Cocaine seizures mark RP's share in global anti-drug drive

CEBU, Philippines - The seizure of cocaine in Samar and in Davao City is the country’s significant contribution to the world’s anti-drug campaign for the year 2009.

Studies reveal that users consume an average of from .01 to .02 grams of cocaine per session. Therefore a gram of cocaine could be shared by a conservative estimate of five persons.

A cocaine brick, weighing one kilo could be consumed by at least 5,000 users. The 200 cocaine bricks seized by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and the Philippine National Police save at least one million would-be users.

This is the assessment of Dangerous Drugs Board vice chairman Clarence Paul Oaminal who personally stayed in the Leyte-Samar area to supervise the cocaine retrieval where, up to the latest countdown, has reached more than 200 bricks.

Oaminal said that if it were not for the speedy action of the Philippine government in the retrieval of the drugs, it would now have been distributed and consumed by drug dependents not necessarily in the Philippines but in Hong Kong as well which is the point of destination of the vessel that unloaded the shipment; and in the United States of America and other European countries.

Aside from the cocaine seizure in the provinces of Eastern Samar and Northern Samar, the Philippine government likewise seized 16 kilos of cocaine in Davao City last December. The cache would have been consumed by at least 75,000 cocaine users.

The Philippine anti-narcotics agents may not have the best technologies and logistical requirements but they definitely achieved their mission, this was learned.

With the past year alone, PDEA in coordination with the PNP and the NBI dismantled more than a dozen clandestine shabu laboratories nationwide. It is likewise beyond argument that more than 70 percent of detainees in jails nationwide are drug-related, an evidence that enforcers are indeed arresting drug offenders.

If our law enforcers are not doing their job then there would not have been jail congestion in our correctional facilities, this was further noted by the studies.

The rise of the price of shabu is basically founded on the fact of less supply and the higher percentage of arrest of pushers because of the operations carried out by our law enforcers. — Johanna T. Natavio/MEEV (THE FREEMAN)