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Herbie Gomez .

SOMETHING is not right with a well-informed society that doesn’t do anything to rid itself of the narcotic drug menace.

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The country’s drug problem has been pestering generations of Filipinos, dating back to the 19th century when tobacco, a plant native to the North and South American continents, reached the shores of Southeast Asia. Mixed with addictive narcotic extracted from seed capsules of breadseed poppy, that gave rise to “opium smoke.”

El Filibusterismo’s Kapitan Tiago, we are told by national hero Jose Rizal, had a serious drug problem; he frequented fumaderos de anfion in order to smoke opium. Fumaderos were public houses equivalent to what the police call today as “drug dens,” except that in Rizal’s day, these were licensed.

Kapitan Tiago’s problem was so serious that in Rizal’s sequel to Noli Me Tangere, we are told that the Kapitan lost everything he had because of his addiction. Dr. Rizal knew what he was writing about because he saw how the addictive narcotic could destroy lives and so he wrote: “Ang sugapa ang halimaw ng bisyo.” That conclusion, which is correct then and correct now, was apparently a result of a period of experimentation in Rizal’s teenage years and the ugly consequences of addiction that he saw around him.

Years earlier, at 18, Rizal admitted to experimenting with the hallucinogen hashish which, at that time, was seen as pharmaceutical, and an economic commodity just like intoxicating drinks that 21st century society remains tolerant of. Historian Ambeth Ocampo quotes Rizal in the latter’s March 5, 1890 letter to German anthropologist Dr. A.B. Meyer: “I myself, though, in 1879, used hashish, did it for experimental purposes, and I obtained the substance from the drugstore.”

As Ocampo correctly points out in “Rizal the user,” an Aug. 19, 2016 column in the Inquirer, if the young Rizal did something like that today, “he would probably be found dead on a Manila street with a crude cardboard sign identifying him as a drug user.”

That would be a likely scenario given the police’s seeming inability today to tell the difference between those merely experimenting with substances or frequent drug users and those already addicted to it who are all in need of professional intervention and help, and between the poverty-stricken street peddlers who are “hawak sa patalim” and the moneyed and greedy suppliers who simply do not care. As we are seeing, they are all the same — “high-value targets,” as they are called — in the eyes of those tasked to carry out the bloody “war on drugs.” There lies the big problem with this bloody campaign.

It would not be unthinkable then why an 18-year-old like Rizal, a potential nationalist and polymath, could end up as a mere statistic in the list of this ongoing carnage as a result of one bad choice of experimenting with an illegal substance.

***

Members of the Cagayan de Oro City Police Office (Cocpo) are clearly following a narrative template in their campaign against Filipinos in the city whom they consider to be hopeless misfits.

On Friday, they killed another suspected drug peddler who, I wish to stress, was a Filipino. Let me emphasize “suspected” because it means that the suspect’s or victim’s guilt had never been established. “Suspect” simply means that the accusation may have basis or it may also have no basis at all. It could mean he was guilty or it could also mean innocence.

The police’s narrative on the shooting death of 30-year-old Jimboy Amodia of Lapasan, the 13th Filipino citizen in Cocpo’s growing list of “drug war” kills on record, is the basically identical with previous police accounts on how mere suspects were killed in Cagayan de Oro. In this template, all one has to do is fill in the blank spaces for names, dates and places, and spice the narrative a little bit with new information about the suspects — or victims.

***

Using Cocpo’s template and incorporating the personal data of Rizal who admitted to experimenting with a narcotic drug when he was 18, we can simulate and produce this ridiculous news story about the next buy-and-bust operation. Read on:

Police kill ‘high-value target’ from Calamba in drug shootout

Authorities shot and killed a young man, suspected to be a drug dealer, during another buy-and-bust operation in a commercial district in Cagayan de Oro at dawn yesterday.

Police said the suspect, 18-year-old medical student Jose Rizal, a scion of a prominent and well-to-do family in Calamba, Laguna, resisted arrest and was shot dead when he turned violent and attacked an officer doing undercover work.

Rizal, who dreamt of becoming an ophthalmologist one day, was the 14th suspect killed in the city on record since the Cagayan de Oro City Police Office (Cocpo) launched the Duterte administration’s bloody “war on drugs” here.

Police said all they wanted to do was to arrest Rizal and charge him in court but after he sold a sachet of suspected shabu to an undercover agent for P500, he sensed that it was an entrapment, and then he suddenly turned violent. It was unclear exactly how Rizal sensed that he was the subject of an entrapment and how the poseur-buyer unwittingly blew his cover but the realization, according to the police, came right after the suspect allegedly received the P500-payment.

Investigators said Rizal took out a cheap and rusty caliber .38 revolver made in Danao, Cebu, fired several shots at the poseur-buyer who was standing an arm’s length from him and the other officers who were about to pounce on him, and missed all of his targets.

“We were lucky because he did not know how to use a gun. He was a bumbling amateur of a shooter,” said one of the police operatives who claimed that one of Rizal’s bullets missed him by only about an inch.

He said the revolver-wielding Rizal posed a serious threat to the police team whose members were armed with caliber .45 and 9mm pistols and high-powered rifles, prompting them to riddle the teenager’s body with bullets.

Police said they had hoped to save Rizal and so, they rushed him to the Northern Mindanao Medical Center but physicians there declared the teenager dead on arrival.

At the hospital’s emergency room, investigators allegedly found a grenade, also rusty, and several sachets of suspected shabu in Rizal’s pockets.

Police later claimed Rizal would have exploded the grenade had it not been for the timely and quick response of the officers on field.

Authorities said the sachets of shabu in Rizal’s pockets were proof that the medical student was a “big fish.”

Investigators said they also found a P500 bill that was handed to Rizal by the poseur-buyer in exchange for a sachet of shabu. Other than P500, Rizal, the rich teenager from Calamba, Laguna, who allegedly sold illegal drugs here, had no other money with him at the time of his death, according to the police.

Neither did he have pieces of jewelry and other valuables or expensive gadgets with him except for an old Nokia 3310 cellphone that police said may have been bought from a snatcher and used in Rizal’s alleged illegal activities. Police said they have yet to examine the uncharged mobile phone in the hope of extracting useful information and tracing Rizal’s contacts.

Police said Rizal was a known drug user and dealer of addictive substances believed to have been produced in a hacienda in Laguna that his family has been leasing.

Given that his lineage could be traced back to Fujian, China, investigators said they suspected that Rizal was part of the Chinese Triad that has been blamed for much of the supply of illegal drugs in the country.

Police said they were also looking into the possibility that Rizal’s siblings — a brother and nine sisters — were involved, and were determining the extent of their involvement in the Laguna hacienda operations.

***

Yes, something is definitely wrong when a society that knows the evils of illegal drugs doesn’t do anything to rid itself of the menace. But there is also something very wrong when the same society doesn’t question this clearly redundant police account of how suspects got killed. That sounds like murder. But we have all gotten used to this narrative that nobody ever questions the police template anymore. That is the bigger tragedy. Pastilan.

 

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