EDITORIAL – Fight against drugs is far from won

Hardly a day passes with no story about some illegal drug bust. The bust may involve confiscations of small amounts of shabu in sachets or in bigger kilo-sized packs running into a few millions. Occasionally, there are really big seizures that shock and awe even the callous observer. And these "victories" have been going on for quite some time already.

The tendency is to feel good about ourselves, that something is being done consistently against the greatest menace facing the country, and perhaps the world, today. And naturally, the law enforcement authorities involved should be congratulated. That the winning streak has been going on for some time shows they have been doing a good job.

But that is the positive side of it. The negative side is a complete downer. One cannot help but wonder how come, if arrests and seizures are being made each single day for quite sometime already, not just in Cebu City but in many other places in the country, including the big urban centers like Metro Manila, there seems to be no running out of substances to seize and suspects to arrest.

If, say, dozens of people are arrested everyday across the country, and kilos upon kilos of shabu are seized nationwide daily, the logical conclusion would be that sooner or later there will be no more people to arrest and drugs to seize. At the rate the arrests and seizures are being made, the time has to come when we will run out of targets in this successful campaign.

For if this keeps up, this daily arrest of people and seizure of substances, in large numbers and amount across the nation, arriving at a different conclusion cannot be helped, a conclusion that can be very terrifying. And that conclusion can be no other than that the drug problem must be so huge that not even the daily rate of success being notched by the authorities is enough to make a dent in the overall, nationwide scope of the menace.

While we would have wanted to prefer looking at the bright side, and bask in the glory of success over the daily victories made by the authorities against the drug menace, there is just no ignoring the more glaring fact that the problem has not shown any signs of being affected by the consistency of the victories. It is as if the problem is impervious to anything that has been thrown against it.

Maybe it is time we realize that the fight against the drug menace is something that should not be left to law enforcement alone. Maybe it is time the fight involves as many sectors of society as there are willing to join that fight. True, we have heard many times that the fight already involves a wide variety of sectors. But the fact that arrests and seizures are still made daily tells us that drugs are still there in unimaginable amounts. The fight is far from won.