EDITORIAL - Still a “hot” area

Police scored big recently when they nabbed two people for smuggling illegal drugs.

According to news reports, the two, a 63-year-old woman and her 41-year-old son, were found with 25 kilos of suspected shabu worth ?170 million after a drug-sniffing dog detected the drugs in several cardboard boxes inside their vehicle on a roll on-roll off vessel that arrived in Pier 4 in Cebu City last Thursday morning.

The two have denied knowing that they were transporting drugs and said they were just asked to transport the boxes that these came in. We will leave it to the court to decide if they’re telling the truth or not.

Because the two aren’t saying any more, the police aren’t yet sure where the drugs came from and if the cargo was meant to be distributed here or was just passing through and bound for somewhere else.

Cebu has long been a transshipment point for drugs as well as other forms of contraband from one part of the country to another owing to its central location and multiple modes of transportation available in several key areas. There are multiple entry/exit points from one end of the island to the other and it is fairly quick to move between such points, even as the traffic in Metro Cebu is getting worse.

We laud the police for catching these drug couriers in the act. But in the end we have to ask them to keep up the vigilance and not let up because it would seem that drug smugglers are still using the central location of Cebu to their advantage. It’s still a “hot” area to be watched.

And not just that, it would seem drug syndicates no longer have qualms recruiting families --and other people who don’t seem out of the ordinary-- to take some of the risks for them, these are people who may not have any inkling of what they’re doing whatsoever.