It’s a cliché but it’s so apt for this situation that I’ll go ahead and use it —truth is stranger than fiction. What is happening in the Philippines has gone beyond the realm of shocking or scandalous to surreal and fantastic.
President Rodrigo Roa Duterte recently said that major international drug triads 14K and United Bamboo Gang have turned the country into a “transshipment point” for large-scale drug trafficking in Southeast Asia and America.
If that is so, then how is the drug war helping control this tremendous menace? All it does is target individual alleged drug addicts and pushers who might not even be connected to drugs.
The drug war is a penny-ante, two-bit response to an enormous, uncontrollable global traffic in contraband substances. The drug war is small-time. It’s nibbling at the fringes of a huge unchewable mass. It’s not helping. It’s hurting.
Here’s a plot twist: last Tuesday, the House Committee on Health approved a bill legalizing the use of medicinal marijuana.
The proposed Philippine Compassionate Medical Cannabis Act will regulate the use of medical cannabis to treat chronic or debilitating conditions including severe and chronic pain, epilepsy, cancer, multiple sclerosis, cachexia, and seizures.
Registered identification cards will be issued to qualified patients who can purchase medical cannabis at a “Medical Cannabis Compassionate Center.”
The bill can help a lot of people suffering from illnesses that traditional medicines cannot treat. However, I can foresee a lot of trouble and misunderstanding arising from this.
What’s to stop trigger-happy law enforcers or vigilantes from shooting people emerging from a cannabis dispensary? Or someone who has marijuana in their possession for perfectly legal purposes? Or letting go someone who is actually a drug user but then claims it’s medical marijuana? The ramifications of possible scenarios boggles the mind.
The drug war dead, according to various sources, hover around 7,000 to 13,000. It is possible that many more deaths are unrecorded or unattributed.
In any case, one killed without due process is still one too many. Certainly thousands of Filipinos have summarily been murdered in the streets of Manila since Duterte took power on a promise to do exactly this—rid the country of drug addicts and users.
The tragedy of this situation is the likelihood is that many of those slain were not users, much less addicts, only innocent bystanders who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The tragedy is that the process of dehumanization of a certain group of Filipinos has proceeded so quickly that it is becoming the new norm.
The tragedy is that EJKs are supported by millions in the country who revel in vicarious bloodlust and wallow in the satisfying schadenfreude that appeals to our baser human instincts.
“In politics, being deceived is no excuse,” said Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. Are any being deceived here? I think they know all too well what is happening, yet the dehumanization process and mob rule have gripped the country. Many continue to support the drug war despite the unprecedented bloodbath, claiming that it is necessary for peace and order as it strikes a chilling effect among would-be evildoers.
In a 1783 speech to the House of Commons, British statesman William Pitt said: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
And for Filipinos whose ancestors shook off the yoke of colonizers and occupiers only to kowtow willingly at the feet of a local-bred lord and master, the irony is only too palpable.
Let our own Jose Rizal have the last word, and no, it’s not ‘surreal’: “There can be no tyrants where there are no slaves.”
Dr. Ortuoste is a California-based writer. FB: Jenny Ortuoste, Twitter: @jennyortuoste, IG: @jensdecember, @artuoste
