Pubdate: Mon, 10 Jun 2002
Source: Manila Times (Philippines)
Copyright: The Manila Times 2000
Contact:  http://www.manilatimes.net/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/921
Author: Ernesto F. Herrera
Webpage: www.manilatimes.net/national/2002/jun/10/opinion/20020610opi5.html

A NEW LAW TO FIGHT THE DARK PIED PIPER

The President signed into law last Friday the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs 
Act of 2002 or Republic Act 9165, thereby replacing the 30-year-old 
Dangerous Drugs Act of 1972. Among the provisions of the new law is an 
increase in the penalties and fines for possession not just of illegal 
drugs but also of "controlled precursors or essential chemicals" used to 
make illegal drugs.

It also reduces the quantities defining possession of dangerous drugs. 
Under the new law, anyone caught with at least 50 grams of shabu is already 
guilty of "possession"   and can be meted out the maximum penalty of life 
imprisonment or death with a fine  ranging from P500,000 to P10 million. 
Under the old law, the minimum quantity required for an offender to be 
considered a "pusher" and therefore be punishable by life imprisonment or 
death was 200 grams (for shabu possession). It should be noted that the 
Philippine National Police actually asked Congress for a reduction to 15 
grams but perhaps the legislators found the request too harsh.

The same maximum penalty under the new law will be imposed on anyone caught 
with at least 10 grams of opium, 10 grams of morphine, 10 grams of heroin, 
10 grams of cocaine or cocaine hydrochloride, 10 grams of marijuana resin 
or marijuana resin oil, and 500 grams of marijuana.

The new law also imposes the maximum penalty for any government official 
and employee found guilty of drug trafficking (aside from his/her perpetual 
disqualification from any government post), as well as anyone found guilty 
of "planting" dangerous drugs (regardless of quantity) to implicate an 
innocent person.

Another important provision of the new law is the mandatory drug testing 
for the military and the police, for applicants of driver's licenses and 
firearms permits, for all candidates for public office, and for all persons 
charged with a criminal offense punishable by at least six years 
imprisonment. There are also provisions for random drug testing in schools 
and offices, both private and public.

The Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002 has many more provisions that 
mark out a much stricter anti-drug policy, not only in terms of criminal 
liabilities and enforcement of laws, but also in terms of efforts at demand 
reduction, what many people consider to be the more effective way of 
addressing the drug problem.

The new law will definitely help us combat the evil that is illegal drugs - 
an evil that is responsible for more than a third of all the violent crimes 
committed in our country. This evil has not only clung to the Philippines 
like a leech sucking the life and moral values out of all of us, it has 
even managed to creep into every nook and cranny of Philippine society, 
displaying a tenacity that is fed by greed and corruption.

A very popular term nowadays is the a "war against terrorism." However, the 
threat of illegal drugs, drug lords and the corrupting influence they have 
had on the pillars of law enforcement is far greater than any terrorist 
activity that can be sown by Bin Laden or the Abu Sayyaf (Hence the aptness 
of the term "narco-terrorism").

And the tragic thing is that the first to be victimized by this evil are 
our own children, the young on whom we have pinned so much hope for the 
future of our country.

Though we readily acknowledge the evil of illegal drugs, many of us often 
easily dismiss it as too big an issue to be a concern for ordinary 
citizens. The evil is so huge and so overpowering that our mind, presented 
with an incredible reality, chooses to ignore it.

It was very much like what many people did when Adolf Hitler began sending 
millions of Jews to the gas chamber. When people were told that hundreds of 
thousands were being sent to their deaths every week, they either reacted 
with disbelief or numbness. The mind was hard put to grasp the enormity of 
it all, that it simply chose to gloss over it. Not until people saw the 
emaciated faces from the concentration camps, not until individual stories 
of families, of children, of fathers and mothers murdered for no cause at 
all except for their race, did they began to comprehend the horror of what 
the Nazis did.

It is much the same for our modern-day Hitler, the drug syndicates. They do 
not have to wield guns or maintain gas chambers, but they can and have 
killed people a " so many more a " just as efficiently as Hitler did. The 
enormity of their atrocious operations is just as mind-numbing.

According to the United Nations, the illegal drug trade is a 400-billion 
dollar business worldwide, with a captive market of about 190 million 
addicts. This is a figure bigger than most countries' GNP, and rivaling the 
gross profits of many multinational corporations combined.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan describes the figure as "staggering."

Mr. Annan said the illegal drug trade is "larger than the oil and gas 
trade, larger than the chemicals and pharmaceutical business, and twice as 
big as the motor vehicle industry."

The Paris-based International Police Organization or Interpol says that the 
drug business is second only to the world's arms trade.

Four hundred billion dollars worldwide. That's 16 trillion pesos. It 
boggles the mind. But before you tune out and shove the figure aside in 
your minds, I'd like to cite the other figure Mr. Annan cited. One hundred 
ninety million addicts in a world of six billion people. That's three 
people in every 100. And we are counting only addicts, those who are 
heavily dependent on drugs. If we began to count the users, the pushers, 
the drug lords and the victims of drug-related crimes, how many of the 100 
would still be left untouched by the drug menace?

No country is immune. In the Philippines, a report from the PNP National 
Drug Law Enforcement and Prevention Center estimates that the annual 
turnover in the illegal drug trade is P300 billion (from P250 billion in 1998).

The same report said, of the 42,000 barangays in the country, 6,020 or 
about 14.3 percent have already been influenced by the drug trade 
(mysteriously down from about 18 percent in 1999 even if drug trade income 
actually increased).

The biggest casualties are of course our young people. Based on police 
records, the country now has 1.7 million illegal drug users, most of them 
between 15 and 29 years old (in 1997, an SWS survey of the youth estimated 
2.1- million users a " close to 10 percent of the youth population at the 
time).

Indeed, the drug menace has become the dark Pied Piper of the new 
millennium, luring our young people away from what is decent and moral, 
toward a huge cave and right into the bowels of despair and decadence, 
where hope dare not show its face.

There are many ways of combating this menace, and a strong anti-drug policy 
is just one of them. This is why we should support the Comprehensive 
Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002. Our commitment to the fight against drugs 
shows our commitment to our children, and the future they will have to live in.
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MAP posted-by: Beth