ANTI-DRUG LAW

Dear Editor:

It is the kind of law that cannot be enforced without reflecting its
intrinsic lower-class bias. Just what class of suspects does the Philippine
National Police (PNP) present on national TV as warm evidence on the scope
of illegal drugs? Problem is, the script of the PNP in conducting raids,
arrests, or shoot-out scenarios leaves much to be desired.

I can most suspect how legal protocol is casually being breached. These
schemes and scenes, violative of law, cannot go on. They make the
have-nots, the poor and the uneducated as hapless victims of a
single-bladed policy that protects the moneyed class, the elite and the
powerful. Why only the small fish on the chopping board?

It's a good thing the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) has been
left to its own devices. Allowing politicians to mess up its operations is
self-defeating largely because it can be used as an all-expense paid
campaign advantage or an apparatus to harass their political enemies.
Besides, they seem to be keeping skeletons in their closets.

The vicious spin in an unreasonably aggressive anti-drug drive of
projecting the problem as one of epidemic scale is too disconcerting. The
right to privacy, liberty of abode and individual freedom of choice, other
civil liberties, can be transgressed without due process. Spray-painting,
for instance, is deemed beyond the legal.

If the pattern does not change, every Tom, Dick and Harry may walk to
prison on being mere suspect. Bribing police may be therapeutic for some
drug enforcement authorities and the resulting subculture will be as
vicious as it can be. Sadly, the PNP has become a small theater league in
presenting fall guys to the viewing public.

Vigilantism is fast gaining ground. But viewed differently, it is
tactically equivalent to the "secret marshal approach" that has always been
proposed for law enforcement -- a legal shortcut of due process. Keen
observers do think that vigilantism is, in fact, a PNP-led group.
Intelligence operations can take many forms and vigilantism is one of them.
Its dirty-tricks department has killer specialists in it -- if and when
they become necessary.

Again, the manner in which this anti-drug law is enforced down to the local
level makes it a catchbasin for all possible criminal charges any
individual may be faced with. Why is this so? It is so because as the
President herself said, drugs can be linked to many other collateral
crimes. This is why there is serious defect of law that is built on the
theoretical framework of a set of yet-to-be-proved assumptions.

In the end, it is vesting the PNP with a wide latitude of prerogatives that
not a few of its membership do not deserve.

Primer Pagunuran, L23 Block 28, Santana Village, Antipolo City