Drug screening for 360 City Hall employees

CEBU, Philippines -  The Cebu City Office on Substance Abuse Prevention conducted a series of drug screenings on some 360 employees of various offices at Cebu City Hall since Monday.

Results of the drug screenings are pending for more than 200 employees, but one from the Cebu City Sports Commission is now suspected for drug abuse after the drug screening test showed he is positive for shabu.

Jun Reyes, COSAP Executive Director, said that they call those who will test positive during the drug screening as suspected drug users pending the result of their confirmatory test.  The city government is now careful with what terms to use after the confirmatory tests on 16 traffic enforcers tested last year showed they are all clean.

Mayor Michael Rama said the personnel might experience trauma from the incident because they were then threatened with dismissal based on the result of the drug screening.

“We should learn from this. Next time, we will wait for the confirmatory result before making any pronouncement,” Rama said.

All 16 personnel were hired back by the City Traffic Operations Management.

The offices subjected to drug screening since Monday were the Anti-Mendicancy Board, the City Agriculture Office, the Cebu City Sports Commission, the Department of Engineering and Public Works, the Building Maintenance Services and the Office of the Building Official.

Of the seven personnel of the Anti-mendicancy board tested, none turned to be a suspected drug user which is the same with the 42 agriculture personnel tested last Monday.  On Tuesday until yesterday, COSAP subjected personnel from the Sports Commission, BMS, OBO and DEPW.

One from the Sports Commission is now a suspected drug user while two from the BMS were also suspected for drug abuse not because of the drug screening result, but because they tried to evade the drug screening.

COSAP tested 196 personnel of DEPW and 34 personnel of OBO.  The results are still pending.

Reyes said Intelliprime Medical and Dental Laboratories is now bringing the samples to its laboratory.  He assured the samples are sealed.  (FREEMAN)