Laughing it off

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admitted that he smoked marijuana even after becoming a member of parliament. In 2018 under his leadership, Canada legalized cannabis, including cultivation and recreational use, becoming the second country to do so after Uruguay.

In the US, here are excerpts from an autobiography about the author’s use of marijuana and pricey cocaine: “I had learned not to care. I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.”

The author wrote about quitting substance abuse, and pondered what might have happened to him if he hadn’t: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d be headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn’t been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.”

Who’s the author? Certainly not Bill Clinton, who’s white and claimed he didn’t inhale when he tried pot. It’s former US leader Barack Obama, writing in “Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance,” and later fielding questions about his previous substance abuse when he was facing Hillary Clinton for the Democrats’ presidential nomination.

Former British PM Boris Johnson along with several other UK politicians have also admitted using cocaine, cannabis and opium although mostly in their youth.

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President Marcos, openly accused by the Duterte camp of being a cocaine user, was asked in a chance interview Monday about reports that he, together with actress Maricel Soriano, had been on the watchlist of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency.

The PDEA has denied this, but the Duterte camp dismissed the denial as self-preservation on the part of agency officials.

Instead Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, reputed architect and chief enforcer of Oplan Tokhang during the Duterte administration, presented last week former PDEA investigation agent Jonathan Morales, who testified that he signed a PDEA Authority to Operate and a Pre-Operation Report dated March 11, 2012.

The documents were leaked online, prompting the Senate committee on public order and dangerous drugs, which Dela Rosa chairs, to conduct the probe.

PDEA officials have said no such operation was logged on the date in the document. Dela Rosa also said being mentioned in such documents did not mean the persons were already confirmed to be substance abusers; this needed confirmation or validation. But he insisted that the PDEA documents were authentic.

At the same hearing, PDEA Director General Moro Virgilio Lazo declared that the documents were fake.

Yesterday, former senator Antonio Trillanes IV linked Dela Rosa’s motu proprio probe to an alleged ongoing fourth attempt by the Duterte camp to oust BBM and replace him either with Vice President Sara Duterte or her father the former president.

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It’s true that pre-operation reports and inclusion in a drug watchlist are subject to validation – meaning a suspected drug personality is placed under surveillance until the intel is verified.

Neither BBM nor Maricel Soriano was arrested or invited for questioning. Dela Rosa claimed this was due to the intervention of Paquito Ochoa, in 2012 the executive secretary of then president Noynoy Aquino and a partner in the law firm of BBM’s wife Liza Araneta Marcos.

Rodrigo Duterte has never been impressed with BBM, as even his aides now admit. During the 2022 campaign, Duterte accused an unnamed presidential aspirant of being a cocaine-addled weakling.

This year he openly accused BBM of being a cokehead who is “bangag” or high on drugs – a description that drew fire from First Lady Liza Marcos, and a rare barb from BBM himself about Duterte being addled by fentanyl.

The difference is that it was Duterte himself who disclosed during his presidency that he had used the powerful opioid fentanyl for pain management, as prescribed by his doctor, and admitted that it made him feel as if he was “on Cloud Nine.”

On the other hand, BBM, who has in fact been dogged by rumors of substance abuse since his youthful days as the only son of his dictator father and namesake, has yet to categorically and publicly deny using illegal drugs. (Maricel Soriano was also hounded by similar rumors along with an ex-boyfriend close to the current ruling class. But this was years ago, and both are now clean, according to the Marites grapevine.)

“No, I don’t do drugs” – how hard is it to say this for the President of the Republic?

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If BBM did abuse drugs at some point in his extremely privileged life, this is the reason for the start of this article, which shows world leaders opening up about a public health problem, and telling others that substance abuse can be overcome.

This was what former US first lady Betty Ford did, openly discussing her personal battle with alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs, and reducing the stigma attached to these problems. She helped establish a rehabilitation center in California bearing her name.

BBM as President seems to be always in full control of his mental faculties while at work, so he can’t be bangag. In truth, the only time people suspect that Duterte might be right about BBM’s substance abuse is when the President laughs when nothing is funny. That prolonged laughter when asked about the “PDEA leaks” drew snide remarks about what BBM might have been smoking.

Foreigners need an interpreter to understand the meaning of Filipino laughter. We saw how Australian journalist Sarah Ferguson reacted to BBM’s stammering chuckle when she grilled him on ABC Australia about his family’s plunder of Filipinos’ money.

“May I just ask you why that’s funny?” Ferguson asked BBM.

Maybe the same question should be asked about BBM’s reaction to the substance abuse story.

His laughter implies that the nation may have to wait forever, or at best until his presidency is over, before the truth comes out.