A NEW LAW TO FIGHT THE DARK PIED PIPER

The President signed into law last Friday the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs
Act of 2002 or Republic Act 9165, thereby replacing the 30-year-old
Dangerous Drugs Act of 1972. Among the provisions of the new law is an
increase in the penalties and fines for possession not just of illegal
drugs but also of "controlled precursors or essential chemicals" used to
make illegal drugs.

It also reduces the quantities defining possession of dangerous drugs.
Under the new law, anyone caught with at least 50 grams of shabu is already
guilty of "possession" and can be meted out the maximum penalty of life
imprisonment or death with a fine ranging from P500,000 to P10 million.
Under the old law, the minimum quantity required for an offender to be
considered a "pusher" and therefore be punishable by life imprisonment or
death was 200 grams (for shabu possession). It should be noted that the
Philippine National Police actually asked Congress for a reduction to 15
grams but perhaps the legislators found the request too harsh.

The same maximum penalty under the new law will be imposed on anyone caught
with at least 10 grams of opium, 10 grams of morphine, 10 grams of heroin,
10 grams of cocaine or cocaine hydrochloride, 10 grams of marijuana resin
or marijuana resin oil, and 500 grams of marijuana.

The new law also imposes the maximum penalty for any government official
and employee found guilty of drug trafficking (aside from his/her perpetual
disqualification from any government post), as well as anyone found guilty
of "planting" dangerous drugs (regardless of quantity) to implicate an
innocent person.

Another important provision of the new law is the mandatory drug testing
for the military and the police, for applicants of driver's licenses and
firearms permits, for all candidates for public office, and for all persons
charged with a criminal offense punishable by at least six years
imprisonment. There are also provisions for random drug testing in schools
and offices, both private and public.

The Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002 has many more provisions that
mark out a much stricter anti-drug policy, not only in terms of criminal
liabilities and enforcement of laws, but also in terms of efforts at demand
reduction, what many people consider to be the more effective way of
addressing the drug problem.

The new law will definitely help us combat the evil that is illegal drugs -
an evil that is responsible for more than a third of all the violent crimes
committed in our country. This evil has not only clung to the Philippines
like a leech sucking the life and moral values out of all of us, it has
even managed to creep into every nook and cranny of Philippine society,
displaying a tenacity that is fed by greed and corruption.

A very popular term nowadays is the a "war against terrorism." However, the
threat of illegal drugs, drug lords and the corrupting influence they have
had on the pillars of law enforcement is far greater than any terrorist
activity that can be sown by Bin Laden or the Abu Sayyaf (Hence the aptness
of the term "narco-terrorism").

And the tragic thing is that the first to be victimized by this evil are
our own children, the young on whom we have pinned so much hope for the
future of our country.

Though we readily acknowledge the evil of illegal drugs, many of us often
easily dismiss it as too big an issue to be a concern for ordinary
citizens. The evil is so huge and so overpowering that our mind, presented
with an incredible reality, chooses to ignore it.

It was very much like what many people did when Adolf Hitler began sending
millions of Jews to the gas chamber. When people were told that hundreds of
thousands were being sent to their deaths every week, they either reacted
with disbelief or numbness. The mind was hard put to grasp the enormity of
it all, that it simply chose to gloss over it. Not until people saw the
emaciated faces from the concentration camps, not until individual stories
of families, of children, of fathers and mothers murdered for no cause at
all except for their race, did they began to comprehend the horror of what
the Nazis did.

It is much the same for our modern-day Hitler, the drug syndicates. They do
not have to wield guns or maintain gas chambers, but they can and have
killed people a " so many more a " just as efficiently as Hitler did. The
enormity of their atrocious operations is just as mind-numbing.

According to the United Nations, the illegal drug trade is a 400-billion
dollar business worldwide, with a captive market of about 190 million
addicts. This is a figure bigger than most countries' GNP, and rivaling the
gross profits of many multinational corporations combined.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan describes the figure as "staggering."

Mr. Annan said the illegal drug trade is "larger than the oil and gas
trade, larger than the chemicals and pharmaceutical business, and twice as
big as the motor vehicle industry."

The Paris-based International Police Organization or Interpol says that the
drug business is second only to the world's arms trade.

Four hundred billion dollars worldwide. That's 16 trillion pesos. It
boggles the mind. But before you tune out and shove the figure aside in
your minds, I'd like to cite the other figure Mr. Annan cited. One hundred
ninety million addicts in a world of six billion people. That's three
people in every 100. And we are counting only addicts, those who are
heavily dependent on drugs. If we began to count the users, the pushers,
the drug lords and the victims of drug-related crimes, how many of the 100
would still be left untouched by the drug menace?

No country is immune. In the Philippines, a report from the PNP National
Drug Law Enforcement and Prevention Center estimates that the annual
turnover in the illegal drug trade is P300 billion (from P250 billion in 1998).

The same report said, of the 42,000 barangays in the country, 6,020 or
about 14.3 percent have already been influenced by the drug trade
(mysteriously down from about 18 percent in 1999 even if drug trade income
actually increased).

The biggest casualties are of course our young people. Based on police
records, the country now has 1.7 million illegal drug users, most of them
between 15 and 29 years old (in 1997, an SWS survey of the youth estimated
2.1- million users a " close to 10 percent of the youth population at the
time).

Indeed, the drug menace has become the dark Pied Piper of the new
millennium, luring our young people away from what is decent and moral,
toward a huge cave and right into the bowels of despair and decadence,
where hope dare not show its face.

There are many ways of combating this menace, and a strong anti-drug policy
is just one of them. This is why we should support the Comprehensive
Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002. Our commitment to the fight against drugs
shows our commitment to our children, and the future they will have to live in.