APPROXIMATELY 20 to 30 kilos of shabu in the custody of the Philippine National Police (PNP) Crime Laboratory 7 are set to be destroyed through incineration in a cement plant in the City of Naga in Cebu on Dec. 10, 2019.
PNP Crime Lab 7 Chief Police Colonel Roderick Pausal said the shabu that will be burned were used as evidence in court cases that were already resolved. The owners already died or were killed in anti-drug operations.
In a meeting with Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia, the police, Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and judges of the Cebu City Regional Trial Court agreed that the disposal of the evidence through incineration would show the public that the illegal drugs were not “recycled” or sold in the streets after the anti-drug operations.
Pausal said the PNP Crime Lab’s inventory continues and that 170 kilos of shabu, including marijuana confiscated since the 1970s, are still in their evidence room.
The PNP Crime Lab will destroy illegal drugs used as evidence in court proceedings once every three months, as agreed by the court and the concerned government agencies.
“We in the PNP welcome the move to destroy these illegal drugs so the shabu under our custody will not be as much. We have a lot in our evidence room. If we can destroy some of them every quarter, that would be good so there will be less drugs to keep,” Pausal said in Tagalog.
Meanwhile, Pausal said the PNP Crime Lab 7 is expecting to receive in the coming months its own Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, a device used to identify where the illegal drugs came from.
“That is drug profiling and through the profiling, we will have an idea how many sources have entered Region 7,” he added. (AYB, RGT)