SENATE Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III on Thursday assailed Senator Leila de Lima for her supposedly double standard of justice and said President Rodrigo Duterte’s revelation of narco-politicians was no different from the former Justice secretary’s pork-barrel cases.
Sotto said there was no difference between Duterte’s drug list with the list of persons De Lima implicated in the Priority Development and Assistance Fund scam when she had not even filed the cases she was supposed to file as Justice secretary.
“I cannot understand the difference between what De Lima did before and what the President did in line with his campaign against drugs,” stressed Sotto.
When De Lima made public the identities of the people named in the multi-billion pork barrel anomaly, Sotto noted that De Lima never considered tbe human rights of those being pinned down.
Sotto said the President was just doing the right thing because if he did launch a bloody war against illegal drugs, the drug problem would continue to thrive in the Philippines.
Sotto admitted that some of the names on Duterte’s drug list were familiar to him as he had encountered them during his stint as head of the Dangerous Drugs Board at the time of former President Gloria Arroyo.
He recalled that some of these names were submitted to Arroyo as protectors of illegal drugs but they found it difficult to secure evidence against the alleged protectors.
While Arroyo issued an Executive Order to run against persons with links to illicit drug operations, Sotto said he was saddened this was not implemented by former President Benigno Aquino III.
Because of this, he said the number of police and military and even elected officials involved in illegal drugs surged.
Senate Minority Leader Ralph Recto underscored this huge gap between drug dependents and treatment facilities in calling for the setting up of more state-run treatment centers for substance abuse
He said there are 1.3 million drug addicts in the country today, 600,000 have reportedly surrendered to authorities, but the total number of beds in all government and private drug rehabilitation centers in the country is only 3,216.
Worse, seven, or almost half, of the country’s regions do not have a government rehabilitation center.
He warned that if the number of rehabilitation centers will remain the same, “it will take 200 years to rehabilitate all the drug dependents.”
For the 600,000 who had surrendered, it will take almost a century to finish treating them all, Recto added, using as his basis the six-month period before a dependent “graduates” from treatment.
The DDB estimated the number of “dangerous drugs users” at 1,292,752, the figure indicated in the 2016 national budget as the national prevalence of drug use which must be cut.
“Not only is there a “national shortage” in drug rehabilitation facilities, there’s a funding lack too,” Recto said.
He revealed that the P635 million budget this year of the Department of Health (DOH) for the operation of its drug abuse treatment and rehabilitation centers “can only help a small fraction of the drug addict population.”
“That funding level was based on the projected normal volume of patients. It did not factor in the tens of thousands of dependents who surrendered to authorities in the hope that they will be helped in weaning themselves of their vice,” Recto said.
Senate President Pro-Tempore Franklin Drilon urged the Duterte administration to come up with a comprehensive reform package and long-term solutions to solve criminality and bring back the people’s trust in the justice system.
“The challenge to all of us is to come up with a complete and significant reforms in our justice system, so that the government does not have to resort to a ‘shame campaign’ in an effort to solve criminality,” Drilon said.
Drilon stressed the need for the Duterte administration to look for a long-term solution to crimes, saying that “shame campaigning” would not put criminals behind bars.
“What we need is an effective justice system that will make punishment a deterrent against crimes. We must work all together – the three branches of government – for a justice system that is capable to punish criminals on time,” Drilon stressed.
“The effective deterrent against the commission of crimes is the certainty of punishment and expeditiousness of the proceedings,” he emphasized.