Facilitators – strongest link of drug lords to narcopols

CEBU CITY – Authorities have busted 22 shabu factories and warehouses in the past 12 months, netting P22-billion worth of illegal substances. Yet drugs still proliferate because of "facilitators" who intercede with government officials in behalf of rich syndicate bosses. The Church is seeing its flock being lured into drug dependence or quick bucks from peddling. Yet as a moral guide, it is not doing enough to stop it.

These self-confessed failures of authorities and activists opened the first-ever National Consultation on the Awareness and Prevention of Drug Abuse and Narcopolitics. The three-day meeting, convened by Cardinal Ricardo Vidal and PNP Deputy Director General Edgar Aglipay, thus dwelt on how government and civic groups can complement to lick the drug problem.

Aglipay’s Anti-Illegal Drugs Special Operating Task Force admitted to weak evidence-gathering against facilitators – the go-betweens of drug lords and corrupt officials. He didn’t name them, but described how they operate. Usually citizens of good-standing in, say, the Chinese-Filipino community, they are amiable, philanthropic, perhaps even frequent donors to community and Church projects. It‚s the perfect front for their secret, impregnable role in the thriving drug trade.

Syndicates come and go; facilitators stay. The police had dismantled six major syndicates in the 22 busts, led by Jackson Dy, William Gan, Miko Tan and Benito Zhe. The Lim gang relocated to Fiji and the Lam group to Malaysia, but were caught by the Interpol. Yet new syndicates emerged and the enduring facilitators linked them up with the corrupt government contacts.

Drug lords maintain big kitties for facilitators and the contacts. Said Aglipay: "The capital for chemicals to make a kilo of shabu is only P20,000, but the street value of that kilo can run up to P2 million. You can just imagine how, when the volume is in the dozens of kilos, the syndicates can easily throw money for payoffs."

The payoffs make policemen look the other way, prosecutors to foul up cases, or judges to acquit drug lords despite the evidence. Most of all, they finance the election or appointment of officials to positions of influence that the syndicates can call on for protection and relief. The various forms of narcopolitics are, to be sure, punishable by death under the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act. But the setback is in enforcement.

Outdated laws and equipment for electronic surveillance often are cited as pitfalls. It’s more an excuse. Facilitators are known to, yet remain untouched by cops for fear of political retribution. AID-SOTF’s Col. Federico Laciste said their quarry are influential enough to turn the tables on narc agents, portraying them as villains before the press and public, or setting them up for false charges. He had opened his Powerpoint presentation with a photograph, seized in a raided shabu lab, of Chinese Triad bosses with their local political protectors. The picture painted a thousand words, but may never serve as evidence of the illicit connections. During the election campaign, Aglipay’s men traced a drug shipment in Cebu to a gubernatorial candidate and son of a senator. AID-SOTF, to his chagrin, immediately was pilloried for supposed political harassment.

Earlier during a Mass, Cardinal Vidal intoned that drugs continue to pull poor families deeper into poverty. He urged Church groups to be more active in the anti-drug fight in both the supply side, by boldly exposing pushers, and the demand side, through prevention and addict rehabilitation.

In June 2002 Vidal had issued a pastoral statement descrying narcopolitics and the imminence of falling into a narcostate like Colombia. He followed up last year with a circular withholding the sacraments, like Communion, to known but heretofore uncharged drug lords. Peer pressure, it would seem, is the Church‚s big role in the demand side. Fr. Carmelo Diola, a seminary teacher, wanted more than that. Describing the Church as a sleeping giant, he organized last weekend‚s conference to elicit more ways from the faithful to help in the antidrug campaign.

The response was mostly in the area of rehabilitation. It has always been said that the seven government and seven dozen private treatment centers are not enough to accommodate all the addicts in needs of immediate care, estimated at 1.4 million. Fr. Diola said only 0.5 percent of addicts, or 7,000, are in the clinics for six months at a time: "It would take us a hundred years to treat all of them." Rehabilitation is also expensive for families that may already have kicked out the addict for stealing or violent behavior. Private centers charge P30,000 a month for six months, for board, lodging, therapy and medical care. Government clinics are free, but "inmates" nonetheless need P5,000 a month to live comfortably.

The good news, though, is the spread from America to Asia of Narcotics Anonymous (NA), a therapy akin to Alcoholics Anonymous. It can last beyond six months, sometimes up to five or ten years of sharing meetings, but it‚s free.

Recently government and private clinics have found that physiological therapy must always be linked with spiritual reawakening. Fighting addiction is not just a matter of will power against substance abuse. One out of every four persons has higher levels of dopamine, the substance responsible for craving, in the body. More susceptible to addiction from just the first experiment with shabu, they also are the most difficult to wean away from it. Detoxification requires proper diet and, at times, medications. But successful rehab programs are those that, aside from physiotherapy, also bring addict-patients back to God. A conference ender was a letter urging Catholic bishops to set up NA chapters in all parishes.

Among the assenting delegates were Drug Enforcement Agency deputy chief Rodolfo Caisip, Supreme Court administrator Presbiterio Velasco, industrialist Ernesto Aboitiz, Miguel Perez Rubio of Katotohanan, presidential daughter Luli Arroyo, dozens of police officers, youth leaders, priests, nuns, and addiction therapists.

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