IN order to clear all barangays of prohibited drugs by the time the President steps down from office, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) said there is a need to double its efforts and clear as many as 1,000 barangays a month.
In an interview on Tuesday, PDEA Spokesman Derrick Arnold Carreon said that between July 2016 and November 2018, the PDEA had cleared 9,503 barangays of prohibited drugs.
This only represented, based on BusinessMirror calculations, some 22.6 percent of the 42,044 barangays nationwide.
“Kung pwede nga 1,000 [barangays] per month, kung pwede lang [if we can clear 1,000 barangays a month, we will]. Actually, we have a target per year, minimum of 30 percent of the total remaining for the next three years,” Carreon said.
The PDEA estimated that around 22,641 barangays need to be cleared of illegal drugs nationwide. Some 9,900 barangays, meanwhile, are believed to be free from any drug problem.
Carreon said the noncooperation of some village officials is among the problems faced by the PDEA in clearing barangays. Some local officials choose to ignore the drug problem while others choose not to act on it. Carreon said there are even instances where the barangay officials are also involved in drug use and abuse.
Philippine National Police (PNP) data show that of the 606 government officials and employees arrested for their connection to the use and distribution of drugs, 260 were elected officials, 280 government employees and 66 uniformed personnel. “Instead of acting on it, they [barangay officials] will sweep it under the rug, they just sit on the problem.
“Worse is, if the barangay official is involved in illegal-drug activities then we really have a problem because they are part of the problem rather than part of the solution,” Carreon said.
Another factor, Carreon said, is the absence of a working and active Barangay Anti-Drug Abuse Council (Badac). He said some Badac exist only on paper.
The PDEA said the government has seized a total of P25.19 billion worth of drugs, cytotoxic drug cyclopentenyl cytosine (CPEC), and laboratory equipment in the past three years. On an annual basis, this amounted to P128.96 million.
Around P18.43 billion of the amount was related to shabu alone. This was an annual increase of P122.57 million in the past three years.
Data also showed 115,435 antidrug operations were conducted and 164,265 people arrested. Around 5,050 people died as a result of these antidrug operations.