RP is 4th biggest producer of drugs in Asia

The Philippines is now the fourth biggest producer of illegal drugs in the entire Asia, a police officer told a joint Senate committee yesterday.

Police Director Miguel Coronel, executive director of the National Drug Law Enforcement and Prevention Coordinating Center, said that among Asian nations, the Philippines is next only to China, South Korea and Japan in drug production.

He said the number of identified cultivation sites of marijuana has ballooned from nine in 1972 to 98 today.

Marijuana-producing areas in Luzon are located in the Cordillera Administrative Region, Region 1 (Ilocos) and Region 2 (Cagayan Valley), Coronel said.

In the Visayas, cultivation sites are found in Central Visayas, while other plantations can be found in Regions 10, 11, 12, 13 and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, he added.

He noted that while coca plants were reported to be grown in Iloilo and Fuga Island in the early 1990s, there are no more reports of this today.

"There are no opium poppy plantations reported in the country," he said.

He said that while shabu used to come almost solely from China and is smuggled into the country, this drug is now being processed right here in the country.

"The simplicity of processing ephedrine into shabu, the crackdown on drug production in China, and the unfamiliarity of Philippine drug law enforcers and the populace in identifying shabu laboratories are the main reasons for the setting up of laboratories here," Coronel said.

A clandestine laboratory with an estimated production capacity of 800 kilos a month was discovered in Calayan, Cagayan in 1999. It was the first shabu lab uncovered in the country.

Three more shabu labs were dismantled in the next two years: two in Quezon City last year, and one in Barangay Sto. Niño, Lipa City, last April.

Coronel said that in 1999, Southeast Asia accounted for 75.2 percent of shabu seized all over the world, a big increase from 21.9 percent in 1990.

He estimated the illicit drug trade at about P300 billion.