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Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Maxey: How to win war v. drugs
By Ram Maxey
COMMENTARY
The ongoing all-out campaign in Davao against illegal drugs seems to be holding its own, vis-à-vis its proliferation, with continuing arrests of pushers and users alike.
If the occasional summary killing of a pusher by members of the so-called Davao Death Squad (DDS) is part of that campaign, no one has yet come up with evidence to prove that is so.
The Davao City chapter of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) headed by Carlos Zarate, which offered to unmask the DDS and end its killing spree, has so far failed to prove that its bite is worse than its bark.
While the IBP is still trying to make up its mind on how best to pin down its first elusive DDS pistolero, perhaps the people behind the anti-illegal drugs campaign should also embark on a parallel drive without which the fight against illegal drugs would not be a complete success.
Why are there drug pushers? Because pushing drugs is an easy and lucrative undertaking although dangerous, if you know what I mean. How much would a handful of rice or corn or sugar command in the market? Would anyone buy a handful of those? And how much would a handful of shabu sell in the underground economy? Hundreds, thousands of pesos maybe? See the difference? An impoverished family could not survive on a handful of rice or corn or sugar, but by selling a handful of shabu it would have three square meals everyday for many weeks or months.
When 26.5 million Filipinos submerged below the poverty line are trying to survive by hook or by crook, the call of the illegal drugs trade is difficult to ignore.
That is why the other parallel half of the campaign against illegal drugs should focus on giving jobs to the unemployed. No matter how lowly that job is, if the pay is more than enough to keep body and soul together for a working man and his family, it could be a deterrent to engaging in the buy and sale of illegal drugs which its attendant danger: imprisonment, or even death as shown in the Davao experience. The government should come up with labor-intensive projects.
The trouble with modern machinery for example as used in road building is that it robs people of work. While it is true that machinery can do the work of many men and saves time, it also deprives many men of work. Every year the lack of thousands of classrooms is a problem.
Why not build them and give thousands of our unemployed countrymen an opportunity to earn an honest living? Many more thousands can be put to work constructing farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems and similar infrastructures wherever they are needed. Instead of giving the do-nothing Senate billions of pesos in pork barrel, why not invest the money in labor-intensive projects?
In the United States during the financial and industrial slump in 1929 and subsequent years called the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of out-of-work Americans joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and were given picks and shovels and other tools to build infrastructures all over the place. It put food on the Americans’ dinner tables and resulted in a vast network of highways.
If given a choice between living dangerously by pushing shabu or engaging in other criminal acts, and an opportunity to earn a decent livelihood and stay on the side of the law, the average Filipino would still opt for the latter. Honest labor has never been known to deprive a hardworking man of his dignity.
(Ram Maxey writes for Sun.Star Davao)
(October 7, 2003 issue)
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