Her own protection? They didn’t even allow her a change of clothes

Let’s not try to put a political stamp on it. It is a good thing that the President herself announced she is in the forefront of the war against drugs. With so many powerful protectors of this monstrous beast infesting the highest echelons of government and the police command structure, only the chief executive and commander-in-chief can wield an axe sharp enough to sunder the stranglehold this octopus of self-destruction has clamped on our entire society.

Two million drug addicts? Four million? How can we get an accurate count? Drug addicts are the most persistent and persuasive liars in the world, and are, in the early stages, even self-deceptive.

I had a long talk the other night with Police Director General Hermogenes E. Ebdane, Jr., and he calculated the drug syndicates mop up at least P30 BILLION a year in the Philippines. That kind of money can buy a lot of generals, policemen, anti-narc agents, prosecutors, judges, jailers and wardens, not to mention politicians and journalists – yes, media-persons. Often, the contract-you-can’t refuse, Vito Corleone-style, is: "You can become very rich or very dead."

For this reason, we must all dedicate ourselves to the war on drugs – a battle just as deadly as those waged on the field of combat, where every rules is discarded. I we lose, our entire society will collapse within a generation. We’ve panicked lately over the SARS-virus and the agreed of an inexplicable epidemic of atypical-pneumonia. The drug "pandemic" is far worse than SARS, HIV, or Ebola-fever, for in the former afflictions everyone knows the fatal nature of infection. Drugs come in the guise of good "feelings" and, well as one Dutch-manufactured designer drug is misnamed, "ecstasy".

Almost everybody feels the need to publicly condemn the draconian methods invoked by Thailand under Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s direction, in which over 2,500 have been killed in the war on drugs (deplorably even children). As in other wars, innocents die. Yet Thailand, whose northern frontiers are part of the "Golden Triangle" (comprising Thailand, Burma, and northern Laos), where the biggest producers of the opium poppy outside of Afghanistan are located, had to act resolutely, even mercilessly.

Alas, while the United Nations reports that in the Triangle, poppy cultivation and opium/heroin production have gone down 17 percent, it also admits that the "manufacture" of dangerous methamphetamine (shabu), even among the hilltribes, has jumped up.

In short, opium – which, don’t misunderstand, continues to be produced in massive amounts – is slowly declining, while man-made mind-eroding drugs like shabu are escalating in production. Shabu is flooding this country, and even being "finished" here mostly by mainland Chinese.

Some of their stuff even comes from North Korea!