EDITORIAL - New York, New York

The Cebu provincial board may have scrapped its plan to allow 10 of its members to travel to New York to study drug rehabilitation for a week. But the scrapping is already an afterthought. It does not justify its initial conviction that the trip needed to be taken at all.

The provincial board is a law-making body not a drug rehabilitation facility. It can pass legislation pertaining to drug rehabilitation, to be sure, but that's just about it. The finer points of running, operating and managing drug rehabilitation efforts are beyond the purview of the law and lawmakers.

In other words, the provincial board can lay the framework and ensure the funding for the province's drug rehabilitation efforts. But it does not have to run it by itself. That being so, there is absolutely no reason why almost the entire board has to go to New York to study drug rehabilitation.

In fact, there is absolutely no reason why almost the entire board should go anywhere for whatever reason. Their job is here. If, for the purpose of performing well, the board members need to be enlightened by some expert, they can always invite that expert over.

Besides, there is no guarantee that what they will see in America (we are deliberately refusing to use the word learn) can be replicated here. There are just too many differences between America and the Philippines for anything American to be copied exactly the way it is here.

That being the case, any travel by almost the entire board on the back of that illusion will almost certainly be a waste of everybody's expectations, not to mention time, money and effort. Of course, to those involved and itching to go, nothing can be farthest from the mind than waste.

The problem of drugs and all its components such as rehabilitation has been one of the many crippling weights that has burdened this country forever, yet no one has ever truly given the problem the seriousness it deserves, even up to this day.

So never expect the Cebuanos to believe that, all of a sudden, a group of people has suddenly seen the light. And the easiest way to drive home this point is assume that the destination is not New York but some other place else like, say, Pyongyang. Would the same 10 go? Would even one go?