Special Report: Who are vulnerable to drug use?

Risk at the margins. Young boys scavenge for items they can use from the garbage floating in Mahiga Creek bordering Mandaue and Cebu cities. Out-of-school youth and the marginalized have a higher risk of initiating drug use, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (SunStar File)
Risk at the margins. Young boys scavenge for items they can use from the garbage floating in Mahiga Creek bordering Mandaue and Cebu cities. Out-of-school youth and the marginalized have a higher risk of initiating drug use, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (SunStar File)SunStar File

IF there is any lesson to be learned from the tens of thousands of Oplan Tokhang surrenderers in Cebu who chose not to undergo or to complete drug rehabilitation—despite the threat of police swooping down on them if they ran afoul of the law again—it is that in the war against drugs, prevention is better than cure.

This is why the Cebu Provincial Anti-Drug Abuse Office and other government and non-government organizations have embarked on information campaigns against drug use.

But knowledge about the ill effects of drugs won’t be enough to keep people away from them.

In its 2015 International Standards on Drug Use Prevention, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said many other factors affect people’s vulnerability to drug use and other negative behaviors.

“More than a lack of knowledge about drugs and their consequences, the evidence points to the following among the most powerful risk factors: biological processes, personality traits, mental health disorders, family neglect and abuse, poor attachment to school and the community, favorable social norms and conducive environments, and growing up in marginalized and deprived communities,” it said.

Marginalized

The number of the marginalized and out of school shows the scale of the vulnerable to drug use and the large effort required to keep them away from drugs.

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, 179,162 families in Cebu (or 986,557 people) live below the poverty line, meaning they live on less than P60 or US$1.15/day.

But while the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has a National Household Targeting System showing who the poor are, from which it can pick the poorest to qualify as beneficiaries of its Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program, not all the very poor are included in the program.

“Since the budget is not enough, when we find out who are the poorest, we have criteria on who can become members: The person must have been pregnant at the time of the enumeration, or have children zero to 18 years old, to become a 4Ps beneficiary,” said the DSWD 7’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) regional project coordinator Raquel Enriquez.

Only 151,706 households in Cebu, of which 127,410 households are under the regular CCT program, and the rest under the Modified CCT (MCCT) program, are 4Ps beneficiaries.

MCCT caters to families in need of special protection, including street families, itinerant indigenous families, families displaced by disasters, families with a person with disability, child laborers, children in conflict with the law, and victims of human trafficking.

And Pantawid counts only the household, not the family. There may be two to three families living in one household.

“In fact, in every household, we monitor only up to three children. Because some have nine or 10 children, so if we include them all, the budget of Pantawid will focus only on them,” Enriquez said.

Asked if inclusion in the program had prevented Pantawid households from getting involved in drug use, Enriquez said that in the Pantawid monthly Family Development Sessions, beneficiaries were taught about parental responsibility and children’s rights, and topics on drug use prevention were injected there. However, they heard that some surrenderers had been identified as Pantawid members.

The DSWD does not track this, though, as it is focused more on monitoring the compliance of the households with the conditions for receiving the health and education grants under the 4Ps, she said.

Out of school

The proportion of the population who should be in school but are not is also sizeable.

According to the 2013 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey, some 294,256 people, or 10.6 percent of the 2,776,000 school age population (six to 24 years old) in Central Visayas, were “out-of-school children and youth.”

“Out-of-school children” were persons 6 to 14 years old not attending school, while “out-of-school youth” were persons 15 to 24 years old who were not attending school, had not finished any college or post-secondary course, and were not working.

Majority, or 44.8 percent, of those not attending school in the region cited “employment/looking for work” as their reason for skipping school. Others cited lack of personal interest (14 percent); marriage (9.8 percent); family income not sufficient to send the child to school, referring to all educational expenses other than tuition (8.1 percent); and high cost of education (6.4 percent).

Half of the 2,247 minors who have surrendered under Oplan Tokhang in Cebu are out-of-school youth, according to the Police Regional Office 7. (CTL)

(Last Part: Biggest contributor to drug problem identified / PDEA, PNP weigh in on war against illegal drugs)

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