Cadac told to review tanods’ participation in anti-drugs fight

Mayor Tomas Osmeña convened members of the Cebu City Anti-Drug Abuse Council (Cadac) for the first time since he assumed office on July 2016.

Their first mission: assess the participation of tanods from the 80 barangays in the city’s anti-drugs campaign.

“I will see the ratings, and I will decide who among the tanods will lose their allowances,” Osmeña said during his press conference on Thursday.

Garry Lao, head of the City Office for Substance Abuse Prevention (Cosap) and the newly designated Cadac co-chairman, said he and other council members are prepared to respond to the mayor’s challenge.

Osmeña said in an earlier interview that he was dissatisfied with tanods participation in the city’s anti-drugs campaign and even threatened to suspend release of the allowances they are getting from City Hall if they do not shape up.

Based on Cosap monitoring, Lao said, there are Cebu City barangays that continue to fail in their anti-drugs campaign implementation.

Without having to name these barangays, Lao is confident that mayor Osmeña’s threat will compel barangay officials and tanods to work even harder.

He said that Cadac will rate barangays based on their actual outputs and not on the reports that they will submit.

“We will grade them according to performance and recommend it to the mayor,” Lao told reporters in an interview after the Cadac meeting on Thursday.