EDITORIAL - Solve illegal drugs and you rid many ills, obscenity among them

A proposed amendment in the city's anti-indecency ordinance seeks to give the Cebu City Anti-Indecency Board the power to confiscate published materials that it considers as obscene and indecent. The proposal naturally met stiff opposition from representatives of publications. Much of the opposition dwelt on legal issues pertaining to the determination of obscenity.

Let us, therefore, leave that matter for a while with the legal experts. Let us move instead to why there is a need to crack down on what the city, and the board, would consider as obscene. Or, to make matters even more interesting, has there been a real and palpable surge of obscenity in published materials in the city that would drive it, and the board, to the point of actually seizing any and all obscene materials?

The question is asked because there does not seem to be any real and palpable surge of obscenity in published materials that anyone has noticed, at least not in the sense that it would leap out of the shadows to grab anyone's attention by the collar. If there is a destination that obscenity seems to be inexorably headed, it is not on the printed page but in cyberspace. Maybe that is where the attention should be.

On the other hand – and this is said not in defense of obscenity but in spite of it – why expend so much hot air on obscenity when it is clearly a product of some other very serious failure elsewhere, most notably in the area of family, an area in which the city is failing very miserably to promote and protect, directly or indirectly, because of its failure to stem the tide of illegal drug addiction.

Illegal drug addiction is the single most disastrous thing that has befallen society and it is the root cause of many of its unwanted consequences – obscenity is just one of them. When addiction strikes a family, especially the parents, the family falls apart. When it does, every sense of what is good is lost. Children turn to crime and fall into sex, of which obscenity is just a manifestation.

In other words, there would be little or no compulsion for the city, and the CAIB, to flirt with potentially illegal methods to address obscenity if it takes a longer view of the problem by expending more effort instead to go at the root, which is illegal drug addiction. So many of the ills of society will be addressed if that society succeeds in even just reducing by half all incidences of drug addiction.

We would even be so confident as to boldly predict that if the city succeeds – and we mean truly and verifiably succeed – in just halving its illegal drug problem, even such an agency as the CAIB will become irrelevant. The city should put its money where its mouth is. If it truly wants a society as close to ideal as possible, it should focus its energies on the problem of illegal drugs.