THE arrest last Nov. 30 of two persons who had P41.8 million worth of shabu in their possession in Barangay Sambag 2 in Cebu City should offer the police a number of insights, and it’s not only about where these were stashed (in a rented apartment). Also in November, an apartment in Barangay Tisa in Cebu City yielded P39 million worth of shabu.
The stash could attest to the magnitude of the illegal drug operation in Cebu City nowadays, and which may not have been dented much by the intensified war against illegal drugs that has already felled thousands of people. And it should point to law enforcers the direction they have to take in this war.
We have already noted this when the Duterte administration took over in 2016 and the war against illegal drugs was in its very initial stage yet. Targeting street peddlers and killing them may work in the short term but what will win the war is supply denial and the crippling of the organization of syndicates, which requires painstaking intelligence work and timing.
The trading of illegal drugs in Cebu, both in Cebu City and the province, has always been big. The confiscation of illegal drugs worth millions in the past two months could not even compare to the dismantling in 2004 of the shabu laboratory in Barangay Umapad in Mandaue City that yielded more than a ton of shabu and shabu ingredients, leading authority to call it a “mega” shabu lab.
If there is no more shabu lab in Cebu, where are the drug peddlers getting their supply? The latest information provided by Guadalupe Police Station Chief Dexter Basirgo is that the financier of the two pushers arrested in Sambag 2 is an inmate connected to a big-time drug pusher in Luzon. Wasn’t there talk earlier of drug supply in Talisay having been sourced from Mindanao?
The police may have to straighten out their intelligence gathering work and go for the big-time suppliers of shabu here. As Sen. Panfilo Lacson advised weeks ago: “Don’t kill the street pushers. Arrest them. Make them lead you to the big-time suppliers, then finish the job by engaging those suppliers in a shootout. Get another street pusher and continue the cycle.”