Drugs and trafficking go together

THE use of illegal drugs is part and parcel of the human trafficking chain of activities, an official of the Inter-Agency Council against Trafficking (Iacat)-Davao said.

Most of these trafficking activities, he said, are done by syndicates especially for sexual exploitation.

“Drugs can be used by the syndicated to further the exploitation,” he said in an interview.

“They lure women to work as waitresses and eventually end up as sex objects. And in order to continue with the exploitative job, they have to lure them to drugs so that their resistance can be weakened,” he added.

In its worst manifestation, Arellano said there will always be evil persons, exploitative people who have perverted values, who have the motive of earning easy money and power.

“The lure of easy money could be the reason and there are really some individuals who are just plainly bad people,” he said.

He added that: “It is the feeling of being powerful over women and children or even men, who are helpless for reasons of poverty. These are all incidents of abusive use of power of one person over another.”

Even Davao City Vice Mayor Rodrigo Duterte earlier said he supports the call of reviving the death penalty especially for human and drug traffickers.

"Between the two crimes, I want death penalty imposed on human trafficking as it is the crime where persons are shipped out and then sold as slaves. My temper flares against these people," he said.

Duterte said a person who thrives in a business that sells his fellowmen "deserves nothing less than lethal injection."

"For a person to sell another person is a most despicable act that's why I am infuriated by that," he said. (Arianne Caryl N. Casas)