The price we pay
How difficult it is to move to other subjects without being drawn back to the drugs issue. There are many competing controversies, each worthy of focused attention, but each quickly falling to the wayside when the news or conversation turns back to drugs.
I have written three articles in the last four weeks about the drug scourge from several angles. And I know there are several more that I can cover, especially how one drug addict can trigger so much misery in a family. Considering that a conservative estimate today is already three million, that can conceivably be three million families. The more aggressive estimate is double that or six million. And six million families mean one-third of the Philippine population of families.
I would like to open new fronts for thought and discussion, for issues like constitutional change, federalism, the Marcos burial, China and its territorial claims, peace talks with the Left and with the Muslims in Mindanao, even the horror of mindless and greedy urban development known as Metro Manila and its attendant traffic nightmare. Most of all, I wish to direct more attention to poverty, to landlessness and homelessness, to hunger.
The reality is, though, that drugs will remain central in our national attention for some time, and it rightly belongs there. Because we did not care enough before, because its consequences are catching up with us, and because it will not take long before it reaches our doorsteps. It is already out there, in full force, so much so that the poor whom it affects the most simply caved in before its powerful onslaught, in muted silence and resignation as they are prone to do even in the face of creeping death. The 600,000 drug dependents and pushers who surrendered, arguably part of a market ten times its number, are mostly poor. That is why we did not do enough against the threat of drugs—because they threatened the people we never enough cared about.
It would be very amusing if it were not so grotesque that much focus and debate center around drug-related killings. This just shows how largely ignorant we remain to be about what illegal drugs are to a society that has been overtaken by these. It just shows we have very little understanding of what a narco-state is all about beyond two words put together by politicians or government politicians who know enough about it.
It will take too long for me to describe what a narco-state is all about. It does not take long to know its essence, though, for those interested. The powerful world of the internet and Google can educate you fast enough, if you really want to know and get a glimpse of what a president who understands better must feel. I am sure that, in his mind, he is scared silly about life in a narco state, not just what drugs do to the physical and mental health of victims, the emotional and financial turmoil of their families, the hundreds of billions generated in its manufacture, trade band distribution, and the corruption it encourages and thrives on. Let’s go to what has recently shocked us the most—the drug-related killings, extrajudicial or not.
Killings and a narco-state are one and the same. If we do not prevent ourselves from becoming a narco-state, then we must learn to expect the killings, more and more of them as the process of cooptation by the drug trade deepens. The closer we really are to being a narco-state can eventually be measured by the violence it inflicts on our society, physically, psychologically and spiritually.
Let us take a few examples of what a narco-state can be, the more popular ones so any of us can research them quickly. Let us limit ourselves to just two for the moment—Colombia and Mexico.
Drugs have penetrated Colombia and Mexico for decades, and the fight goes on, the fight of society to survive without illegal drugs and drug lords taking over nations, and the fight by drugs and drug lords to dominate their countries enough to spread their business and control to other countries. As of 2012 or 2013, drug-related deaths in Colombia have reached over 450,000, and in Mexico, over 220,000. As I said, the drug wars continue, and so will the killings. And where are we today—1,000 plus?
The pressure alone induced by a relentless war against drugs will induce killings, just like what has been happening in Colombia and Mexico. I don’t believe that all the presidents of these countries in over 20 years loved killing, or that their citizens wanted the violence. Colombia now has halved the killings because it has seriously tried to address poverty. But it has to take the killings even at reduced levels until antipoverty efforts succeed.
We, too, and not only government, must aggressively address poverty. We understand that poverty is the major cause why our poor comprise the bulk of drug dependents and pushers. How long, then, will it take for poverty to be reduced substantially? Meanwhile, how else can we reduce the march of narcotics before it takes over our whole society? Who has a brilliant suggestion?
We have had cancers in our midst called poverty and corruption. The price we keep paying for them has been rebellion and secession. Now, another cancer called drugs is growing, and violence, too, is its price. How easy it is to say we do not agree with extrajudicial killings, but how bereft we are of doable solutions on how these can be stopped.
Unless President Duterte will tell drug lords, their protectors in the police, the judiciary and all others from government that they don’t have to be afraid anymore because it will be business as usual, the way it was when we did not know what we know today. But let us not hold our breath because he will never do that.
