Three drug-free barangays in Cebu may be taken off list

Take action on or before Aug. 1 or lose your certification and suffer the consequences.

This is the warning of Director Yogi Filemon Ruiz of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency in Central Visayas (PDEA-7) to officials of three barangays that are among the 160 barangays declared drug-free areas in Cebu, which are being looked into if certain criteria of the drug-free certification had been violated.

Pending the results of Oversight Committee on Illegal Drugs’ validation reports, Ruiz did not disclose the names of the barangays, but he encouraged them to initiate actions to ensure that they would remain in the list.

“Monitoring our drug-cleared barangays is a part of the agenda for our next meeting, which will be on August 1. So these three barangays, we gave them a deadline to do something about their status on or before August 1,” he said.

Otherwise, Ruiz said that not only would they be removed from the official list of drug-cleared barangays, but the concerned barangay officials might face administrative charges.

According to earlier reports, barangays that are declared as drug-cleared might lose their certification if authorities would discover either the presence of illegal drugs, a functioning shabu laboratory, or drug surrenderers who had tested positive in using illegal drugs.

Ruiz, however, did not specify which of the above guidelines that the three barangays violated, as these barangays were still being investigated.

The oversight committee, which is headed by Ruiz as the PDEA chairman, officially declared 40 more barangays in Cebu province as drug-cleared during a ceremony last Thursday morning inside the Capitol Social Hall in Cebu City.

The committee’s members included PRO–7, the regional offices of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG), the Department of Health (DOH), the Cebu Provincial Anti-Drug Abuse Office (CPADAO), and Cebu governor Hilario Davide III.

Last Thursday, Bogo City’s 29 barangays were declared drug-cleared and made the city the local government unit in Central Visayas with drug-free barangays.

This is also the second batch of barangays officially declared by the oversight committee as drug-cleared. The first batch was composed of 120 barangays, and were declared during a ceremony last July 17.

The newly declared drug-free barangays increased their number from 120 to 160 drug-cleared villages.

Ruiz also reminded the officials of these drug-cleared barangays to maintain their reputation.