THIS is a true story. There were 26 fellows who made it through a community rehabilitation program for drug dependents. They were a solid group, religiously attending the two-hour sessions every afternoon, seven days a week, for six months. The sessions started with 40 of them, but a good number eventually dropping out for varied reasons—some for work, the others simply fell deeper into the vice. But the determined 26, age ranging between 16 and 57, finished the course, with heads held high as they earned the reassuring pat on the back by their respective families.
Set for them after the program was a scholarship to a vocational course, with a modest allowance. Depending on the course, they would have to attend school for at least six months to a year. That would mean they could not work, won’t have income to bring home and feed their families within the period of attendance. Consequently, only a handful took the offer, but later dropped off since family needs came by the day. The daily allowance could only go as far as a single meal and fare.
So they were back to the old odd jobs. Some of them were trisikad drivers, some village hands who took just any task for a meager sum. Living in the same neighborhood that laid them bare to the lure of drug use and errands, the cycle easily sucked them back. Although a big part of them ached to hold on to their better state after the program, poverty simply left them vulnerable.
Amid their intermittent relapse, miracle of miracles, a few of them crawled back to rudimentary sessions with the old rehab buddies, in some friend’s house, secretly huddled for the Narcotics Anonymous rites of group healing. Still, for the 26 of them, the battle continues to be uphill, tougher as ever. One is now in prison after a drug bust, a good number of them back to small-time running, the others either fully reformed through the aid of family members, some simply disappeared without trace.
In all, this rehab program illustrates the brief trajectory of public foresight as far as investing efforts toward solving the country’s illegal drug problem is concerned. That the perceived mission order of the day, popular at best and secretly endorsed, is “kill,” all the efforts in the government’s drug war are rather primitive, misdirected, ill-informed, violent, ultimately evil.
Funny thing is you can’t even say the drug war failed when the President himself admitted so in various occasions, in public speeches.
Very firmly we say it here: It failed. And it has to do with a flawed mindset. We have a government that insists on looking at the drug problem exclusively as a problem of law enforcement. The results? Bloodbath. And while we say that, there is a multitude of best practices out there that yielded positive results. All you have to do is search the Internet and you will have official portals for your total enlightenment.
Government should wean itself from its perennial addiction to the old ways.