SENATOR Juan Miguel Zubiri favors increasing the 2017 budget of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency specifically for capital outlay like purchase of firearms—long and short—as well as protective gear like vests, helmets, night-vision goggles, and vehicles.
Zubiri will support the increase of PDEA’s budget from P1,014,236,000 to P1,217,521,000, or at 2.04 percent increase.
He called on the PDEA “to hire more agents as stated in PDEA’s mandate wherein an anti-drugs team should be formed on a per province and city basis nationwide, not like the current practice of assigning a team per region only.”
He said the PDEA only has around 2,000 personnel, with 1,200 law enforcement agents for 102-million Filipinos.
He also noted that 80 percent of their 400 long firearms break down due to poor quality.
“So there is really a need to increase their budget to give them additional bullets, guns, literally,” stressed Zubiri, adding additional funding should be given for vehicle support and bullet proof vests, among others.
“It’s unthinkable and unimaginable that our troops in this day and age don’t have that kind of budget and equipment,” Zubiri said.
He also recommends increasing the budget for intelligence gathering and operations.
Zubiri noted “a third of the reasons for the low prosecution rate of PDEA cases is procedural, like ineffective prosecution due to inefficient handling of evidence, failure of PDEA agents to appear in hearings and weak prosecution service.”
However, he said they want to see that the agents also deserve more support by way of more lawyers rendering legal services for them.
“At the same time that we support your additional requests in the budget, we hope the PDEA will also support us by cleansing their ranks.”
DDB Assistant Secretary Benjamin Reyes told the Senate Finance committee that with the government’s intensified campaign against illegal drugs, they expect one-million drug dependents to surrender before the end of the year.
He noted it would cost the government P4 billion to rehabilitate all of them.
He said only one percent of those who surrender undergo “in-patient” rehabilitation, while two to 10 percent are outpatients.
According to him, majority or 90 percent of drug users will be given community-based treatment and rehabilitation interventions, such as briefing and motivational counseling.
He proposed there should be at least one rehabilitation center in every province to accommodate the slew of drug surrenderers under the Duterte administration.
Health officials had admitted the severe lack of rehabilitation centers for the hundreds of thousands of drug suspects who had been opting to surrender as the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte pursued its fierce war against drugs.
Health Undersecretary Elmer Punzalan earlier told the Senate panel there were only 44 drug rehabilitation centers across the country—just 15 of them public—now operating as throngs of drug dependents were coming forward to the police.
“It’s different this time. We call it an influx. Now, those surrendering are coming in by the thousands. Our rehabilitation centers are crowded,” Punzalan said, responding to lawmakers’ queries on the capacity of government to respond to the flood of surrenderers.
He said 600,000 drug dependents by far had surrendered since President Duterte waged his all-out war, of whom nine percent, or 54,000, were determined to be in need of confinement in a rehabilitation center.
This, while the total number of rehabilitation centers in the country could only take care of 5,000 patients in all.
Drug rehabilitation takes between six to 12 months, depending on the degree of addiction of drug users, according to the health official.
He placed the success rate of rehabilitation at a low 24 percent in the case of marijuana and meth addicts, and about two percent higher if the other kinds of drugs were included. The rest, he said, would go back to their old habits.
He said President Duterte has ordered the establishment of rehabilitation centers in military and police camps “where there is space.”
One is being planned to be built at Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija as an “immediate response” to the dire need for a reformation facility for drug dependents.
