HAPPY
WEEKEND
Gina
Dizon
BONTOC, Mountain Province -- It is an
overwhelming revelation how drug- crazed this country is -- from the
jobless man on the street to generals.
While we have
been hearing talks about generals and barangay captains having their
share in the illegal numbers game of jueteng, this shabu
industry has made nagging impression of mayors and judges and
generals having biggest shares in drug money.
It is not surprising
when suspected drug protector mayor Cris Mahilac of Misamis Occidental has a
mansion of 500-peso bills decorated in their living room
obviously flaunting the wealth of the owner of the house and his lovely wife who
often tour the world.
Add other big houses
of suspected big time drug lords and pushers such as Kerwin
Espinosa, the son of suspected drug protector Leyte mayor Rolando
Espinosa, who is suspected to be out of the country to evade getting killed.
With this staggering
revelation of how well-entrenched this illegal drug business has gotten
its system from the drug retailer to the big time pusher to the
drug lord to the influential government official protecting the illegal
drug trade, this country has been thriving on shabu as a source of money
with drug lords and coddlers in the bureaucracy getting rich for a
long time.
That is, getting
bloody richer from the sale of small sachets of shabu
sealed from shabu laboratories where volumes of kilograms are
packed worth millions to where these are eventually sold by
jobless pushers to jobless users and to target sectors such
as artists and actors in the cinema industry.
Shabu
laboratories as traced as owned by Chinese nationals with
laboratories found in big houses in the city or in small structures in the
hinterlands or right inside the BIlibid Prison walls where drug
lords Peter Co and Herbert Colangco are jailed.
On the other side of
the equation are the many poor impoverished users and pushers on the
street thousands of them hooked on this ecstatic drug called shabu which
could get the user ‘high’ with a pleasurable sense of enjoyment for a
brief moment of happiness, jack up their energy or heighten their sex
drives. And when taken in higher doses could be fatal as one raping a toddler
or an aging elderly or go to a killing spree.
Read the news many
years ago till now about drug crazed men raping and killing their own
members of the family and you will see how taking in shabu makes people crazy.
This scenario
had been going on and on for quite some time and the public
bombarded by news of drug crazed addicts raping a child or killing
a neighbor or anyone they fancy on the street. It’s a sick society.
But the drug lords
and shabu protectors don’t care. All they want is the drug industry to go
on and be protected to thrive and they happy and get richer.
Its unthinkable how
government authorities have turned a blind eye to this sick phenomenon which is
killing the community, ignoring users and pushers while they do
their thing, get easy money and make a sick community.
Comes now President
Duterte’s anti-drugs campaign arresting the pushers, killing those
who resist getting arrested, making pushers and users surrender and
naming drug protectors to shame.
The effect had been
phenomenal and bloody at the same time. Nearly 2000 drug users/pushers had been
reported killed by policemen and vigilantes because accused pushers
resisted or silenced to cease from squealing. Nearly 700,000
thousand users surrendered out from a reported one million plus
users in this drug-infested country.
Some pushers
who surrendered did not actually kick their drug dealing but again went
back to the streets making police work double time to monitor if
surrenderees really stopped selling shabu or not.
In this fight to end
drugs in this country, some innocent persons were killed, caught in the fight
to end drugs in this country relatively a similar condition where an
innocent person is killed in the crossfire of fighting militia from
either the rebels or the Philippine Army in fighting insurgency. One dead
innocent child is a heartbreaking scenario one could cry how this
could happen.
Human rights
advocates are crying foul seeing innocent people killed. They see the
pushers killed summarily either by policemen or vigilantes and label this as
human right violation. They see this as having no due process – that there
should first be a warrant of arrest before a suspect is hauled out from his
house and dragged to jail or get killed instantly.
I guess they
also see families getting killed by drug addicts, young girls getting
raped by drug addicts, a community literally living on drugs, a sick
community. Human rights advocates have their point. That indeed due
process should be served and extrajudicial killings stopped.
But the drug industry
equation is utterly and viciously lopsided. Drug addicts, pushers and
protectors have swamped the streets and communities as against a snail-paced
justice system while babies, children, and families and people getting killed
and raped, drug users and pushers getting lazy wanting easy money, getting
their brains dependent on nothing else but shabu, making themselves useless to
nothing else but shabu, making a community sick and a country sick and
seemingly just existing to eat and sleep and work for the day for nothing else
but shabu.
On the other hand
are vigilante groups silencing users or pushers and helping
in stopping the drug industry, sowing fear and terrifying pushers to stop the
game of drugs. Either the dead pusher did not pay or was silenced to end
squealing of his drug connections. Either way, vigilante groups aid the
illegal drug industry to stop.
The other side of the
equation is are families in danger. The community is in
danger of drug addicts roaming free in public, freely selling shabu and
having their day laughing, snorting making drug lords and protectors
happy.
Life goes on with all
the selling and the snorting and the senseless killing and the raping making
the country a dangerous place to live.
With the rising
figure of surrenderees from the southernmost island of Jolo to
Batanes up north including those who did not surrender, the country is
literally thriving on drugs protected by authorities in government. A
maddening situation it is -- made more complicated by ecstasy drugs from
overseas getting inside the country.
There has to be a
better way to make better things happen with innocent persons killed,
like the fresh woman graduate, a promising citizen for her
family and community and the young boy killed who was invited by a
trike driver to go to town.
The police or the
vigilante who did such a terrible and technical error has to be found out and
meted equal punishment too. Worse if the killing was intentional to
discredit the President or stop his anti-drugs war.
Indeed, harsh
measures have to be instituted. Tough decisions need to be cast. The effect is
bloody. And this was exhibited then in dangerous and drug-infested Davao a
decade ago with people now enjoying the fruits of a bloody measure to end the
drug trade.
Davao is now
the sixth safest city to live in the world along with a community with a
vibrant economy, tarnished however with the recent bomb blast in the city.
Drug addicts and
users have to be stopped, cured of their dependency to shabu, reformed or jailed
and eventually should be back to normal lives as productive citizens.
The government has to
build rehabilitation centers to get these thousands of users and
pushers cured and trained on skills for them to eventually land jobs and
make them productive members of society. This country needs a revamp
of attitudes and habits to make it great- attitudes of industry and
patriotism, pakikikipag kapwa sa sariling kapwa Pipino.
***
The government has
the Technical Skills and Development Authority ( TESDA) and Department of Labor
and Employment (DOLE) and other government agencies such as the
Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and Agriculture with their
intervention on skills trainings to provide jobs and
livelihood for drug pushers. The prison cells are just too small and
narrow for many a surrenderee and jailed pushers.
We salute
the campaign of President Rodrigo Duterte against drugs aside
from wanting to stop corruption and criminality. With the rest of the sixteen
million Filipino people who got him elected to the presidency, we want a state
of peace, order, industry, progress and pagmamalasakit sa kapwa
Pilipino.
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