Fashionable is it nowadays for politicians and aspiring public officials to style themselves as allies in the President’s so-called war against drugs.
Voters should be wary.
More than two years and almost 30,000 slaughtered Filipinos into the term of President Rodrigo Duterte, our country is nowhere near stamping out the supply of shabu or dismantling the network behind the circulation of this and other drugs.
What does candidate commitment to the lethal war truly mean?
In and of itself, principled opposition to the sinister system that enlivens trade in illegal drugs and thereby wastes lives — of those who end up addicted and of the ones they harm — is morally good.
But candidates, from senatoriables to aspiring councilors should concretize alternative positions.
With customs officials having proven so incompetent they have presided over the smuggling into our borders of tons of shabu, candidates should make plans to help keep drugs out of our territory part of their platforms.
Provincial, municipal, and city officials, knowing where our locales are vulnerable, should step up in preventing them from becoming narcotics dumpsites.
With law enforcers being relentless in taking the gunpowder approach to solving the drug problem, candidates should present platforms that underline effective but bloodless solutions.
Sen. Mary Grace Poe-Llamanzares has manifested plans for a Senate investigation of the drug-related killings in Cebu.
Somewhere down the road, the worthy cause of disarming suspected drug personalities should be discussed and pursued.
It should be taken up as a platform that is crucial to making anti-drug law enforcement less and less violent and more and more pro-life.
In the meantime, senatoriables should present new ideas for exercising the Senate’s oversight function in the implementation of anti-drug laws.
The implementing rules and regulations of the law are brilliant but they sadly remain poorly executed as leaders play the vengeance card in Duterte’s drug war.
We should not be kept wondering how different the situation would be if provisions were faithfully observed in the fight against drugs such as actively involving the community, reaching out to the unschooled, and professionally rehabilitating dependents.
The electorate should boycott candidates whose commitment to fighting drugs is just a cheap trick that draws votes yet takes drug smuggling for granted and condones the ongoing national fratricide.
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