Last week’s arrest of two Cebuano businessmen alleged to be supplying the party drug Ecstasy to the Cebu party crowd may help justify Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s order to impose a liquor ban along the Sinulog Grand Parade route and in nearby areas.
Richard Ngo Go and Niel Benjamin Yap may not be the only businessmen allegedly dealing drugs in Cebu City or anywhere in Cebu and they won’t be the last, but at least their arrest gave the Cebu City police’s Drug Enforcement Unit (DEU) the lead they need to uncover the network of drug dealing merchants that continue to prey on the rich and poor.
The string of names of Cebu-based drug suspects had been unspooled even before President Rodrigo Duterte took office and one of them, businessman Peter Lim, had the “fortune” of meeting the President up close and personal in order to assure him that he wasn’t involved in the illegal drug trade.
Then there’s Kenneth Dong, the Cebu-based businessman and nightclub owner who got implicated in the P6.4-billion drug shipment at the Bureau of Customs last year.
We hope the arrest of Go and Yap will result in more arrests of big time drug dealers regardless of their connections with the powers that be. In fact, it will be better if those arrested will identify their patrons so they, too, can be arrested and cause the collapse of the drug network in Cebu, if at all possible.
We say possible because as shown in years past, the illegal drug network had been entrenched far enough, no thanks to its connections to either local officials or some located higher up in the law enforcement hierarchy, that it is protected from prosecution or arrest.
Which is why sadly a lot of Filipinos either publicly or silently support the extrajudicial killings of drug suspects since a lot of them are considered “untouchable.”
But back to Go and Yap’s arrest. Perhaps the most effective and only way to curb if not totally eliminate the flow of drugs to partygoers taking part in the Sinulog celebration is for the commercial outlets being patronized by these revelers to completely cut off and monitor the comings and goings of their outlets.
This includes pushers posing as customers who can slip Ecstasy or any other designer party drugs unnoticed into the drinks of customers who may get hooked or high on a moment’s notice.
More importantly, it’s up to the partygoers to simply say “no” and resist any overtures or monitor any attempts by pushers or even their friends to slip in drugs to their drinks or in their hands or into the drinks and hands of their family and friends.
Only by turning down these drug dealing perps up front and reporting them to the authorities can this insidious illegal drug trade be stopped dead in their tracks without having to resort to EJKs.
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