EDITORIAL - A huge mission to accomplish

A regional official of the Department of Health has claimed the Duterte administration has not been winning in the heightened battle against the illegal drug trade in spite of the fact that it has been one of its top priorities.

Medical officer Dino Caing, in charge of the Dangerous Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment Program of DOH-7, lamented that although they have been doing their job rehabilitating drug dependents, illegal drugs continues to proliferate.

The department has been doing everything to reduce the demand, he said, but illegal drugs continues to flood the region, adding that Central Visayas has the highest drug abuse rate across the country.

Caing has a point and we cannot blame him or the entire health department for such sentiment. Authorities cannot deny the reality that their anti-drug campaign failed to yield the intended results. They, perhaps, never anticipated the magnitude of the problem, seemingly assuming that they can solve it by just going after the street pushers.

Yes, hundreds of thousands have already turned themselves in to authorities to undergo rehabilitation. But the problem is that, aside from the continuing presence of illegal drugs, there has never been a concrete program that fully rehabilitates those dependents, which only pushes some of them  back to their vice.

We are not saying that the war on drugs is bound to fail. The fact that many bigtime drug pushers have been neutralized and billions worth of drugs seized only shows that the campaign is running in the right direction.

The only thing that authorities need to employ is a crusade that is religious enough to go after those drug lords and a solid program that fully heals those dependents so they no longer think of going back to abusing illegal drugs.

Despite scoring big in their drive, it’s still a long way for authorities to go to win the war on illegal drugs, considering the fact that the drug business is still very much entrenched in the country.