Netnet Camomot  TWO pairs of humongous female undies have been posted on Facebook, and ladies with mile-wide hips are of course appalled: Oh, no, not my undies! Those supposedly belong to a Pinay who’s now in a dilemma. And they’re hanging to dry outside the house of her alleged lover. My high school classmates warned: Washed undies should not be hanging outdoors but indoors, preferably in the bathroom. Do make sure it’s not the one for guests, but the one attached to your bedroom. Money laundering, by the way, is one of the ways a drug lord hides his illegally earned wealth. He uses washing machines to cleanse the crimes off that money, and—voila! Hehe. Okay. It’s not that simple. Drug lords lure legitimate business owners to join the drug trade because it’s fast money. It’s like graft and corruption. And the effects are mostly the same: drugs destroy lives, graft and corruption also destroy lives. By taking money off, say, the national treasury, you’re taking money off the budget for health, schools, roads, public transport, other public services. One is connected with the other: there will be no drugs if there’s no graft and corruption. If the drug lord can’t pay people to look the other way, then, there’s no drug to sell. It’s a chicken-egg story, though, on which comes first, the chicken or the egg? If drugs were legal in this country, would drug addiction wane? You know, no need to bribe people to look the other way, no need to hide, no need to go through this ritual of balancing foil and lighters and needles because, hey, they’re now selling a gadget for this! Imagine shabu sitting along with cigarettes and liquor on the shelves of your suki sari-sari store. Oh, that’s happening now? Let’s make the scenario more incredible. Imagine shabu sitting along with cigarettes and liquor on the shelves of your suki convenience store and supermarket. There’s medical marijuana now, so why not a medical shabu? Well, because shabu can never be medical—it destroys the brain, it makes people go mental. Still, why not, coconut, right? People have the right to be high, as long as they’re destroying only their lives and not of their families, friends, and colleagues. But how to contain the destruction? That’s the question. Not all legitimate business owners answer yes, though, to a drug lord’s invite. They know how difficult it is to run a business. Add shabu’s illegal nature to that, and they will always be running away or paying their way through its many obstacles. In the eyes of a business owner, shabu is simply a business he may choose to enter or not. That’s why the drug lord or pusher who’s addicted to shabu, loses in the end, as he becomes too high in managing the business. And then, there’s the addict who resorts to selling shabu when his day job’s earnings are not sufficient to buy the drugs he craves for. Drug lords are aware there’s walang forever on the president’s war on drugs, like any other war. His term, after all, is only six years. It depends on who will be sitting as president thereafter. It’s like the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s rules which encourage Pinoys to have this wait-and-see attitude for the next administration, hoping for friendlier tax laws. The only way the war on drugs may continue is if Philippine National Police Chief Bato dela Rosa or Pres. Rody Duterte’s daughter Davao City Mayor Sara becomes president in 2022. Otherwise, happy days will be there again for the drug lords. The country’s presidency cannot be bought. Well, the scale is not as wide as the undies for the mile-wide hips. Probably partially. But not totally bought. Unlike political chairmanships of smaller groups where money talks a lot. It’s a smaller crowd, doesn’t involve the more than 100 million Philippine population, thus, controllable with money. If you can’t make it in national, provincial or city politics, at least you can make it in a smaller area especially if you have undies that need to be hidden in the closet. The drug addict will always be a drug addict, with or without that war. Besides, Culture Club once sang this: “War war is stupid and people are stupid.” The only difference is the price that the addict now has to pay for drugs—there’s the shabu’s actual price increase, the possibility of cardboard justice, and/or imprisonment which can be in the form of a jail cell or right in his own cave where he hides until the war ends. That’s the unfriendly jail cell now that perks have been removed through constant raids. But for an addict, if there’s a will, there’s a way. The imprisoned drug lord, though, may have it tougher than the imprisoned addict, since most eyes are now on the former. But he’s not exactly the drug lord. President Duterte said the drug lords are in China. So, the ones in Pinas are, what, the drug lord’s minions? Earning millions of moolah, that minion does. As long as you, the non-addict, are not affected, you stay fine. There’s even this unwritten rule to let them be. Let the government have its war on drugs, let the vigilantes indulge in cardboard justice, let addicts be hooked on shabu. It’s their life, not yours. But surely you’ll be singing a different tune if there’s at least one family member addicted to drugs. You’ll fight for his rights, you’ll do everything you can to keep him away from drugs, you’ll do interventions until he submits himself to a rehab program. You’re family. You’re not strangers. And it’s you who see the few good qualities left in him. And there’s that day when the only thing you can do is hug him.