Drugs a P250-B-a-year business

Drug trafficking is now a P250-billion-a-year business in the Philippines that has at least 3.4 million users, according to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, which is spearheading the government’s war against illegal drugs.

"Drugs is a big business in our country," PDEA Director Anselmo Avenido told a media forum, adding that drug traffickers make between P150 billion and P250 billion a year, based on his agency’s estimates.

"It has been a profitable business in our country and the situation has worsened because of the ‘I-don’t-care’ attitude of various government agencies," Avenido said without elaborating.

Around 175 drug gangs operate in the Philippines, 13 of them are foreign, he said. "At least one third of these 175 drug syndicates have already been neutralized. There are Japanese and Chinese nationals."

Of the estimated 3.4 million drug users in the country, 1.8 million are regular users and the rest are occasional users, he said. The drug of choice is shabu.

"In 1972, the primary illegal drug that we were running after was marijuana," Avenido said. "There are 20,000 users of marijuana in the country at that time."

Over the years, users shifted to shabu because it was relatively cheaper than marijuana and gave users more "high." A gram now costs around P2,000, Avenido said.

"But there are areas where the price of shabu ranges up to P3,000 to P4,000 to P5,000. Sometimes drug pushers sell fake or adulterated shabu, mixing it with tawas or alum crystals," he said. "Illegal drugs are hazardous to health in its pure state. When you mix something in it like tawas, it can be very destructive to the user’s health."

Since its establishment in July last year, the PDEA has arrested around 6,700 drug traffickers, including several big-time drug lords, and filed at least 10,000 cases, Avenido said, but there have so far been no convictions.

Last Friday, President Arroyo named Sen. Robert Barbers as anti-drug czar to spearhead the administration’s renewed drive against illegal drugs.

Barbers, who chairs the Senate committee on illegal drugs, will provide "operational directions" to the PDEA. He authored the law that created the agency.

Police say much of the shabu sold in the Philippines comes from China, smuggled through the archipelago’s poorly guarded coastline.

A top United Nations anti-drugs official said around 1,000 drug barons, mostly in Southeast Asia, are flooding global markets with synthetic drugs such as ecstasy and speed as they switch from heroin and cocaine production.

Sandro Calvani, head of the UN anti-drug office for Asia and the Pacific, said the world’s primary source of amphetamine-type stimulants — known by enforcers as ATS — was Southeast Asia.

Calvani said global demand for drugs such as "Ecstasy" and "speed" was growing because their use did not have the same level of social stigma attached to heroin and cocaine.

"Taking heroin and cocaine is largely perceived as deviant behavior so therefore there is significant social control. People are extremely afraid or ashamed of using those drugs," he said.

"In the case of amphetamines, there is significant tolerance in the community... users are not deviant people, they are rigorous workers, rigorous students, who dope to perform better. They look for a quick fix."

He said Myanmar was the biggest producer of speed, which was smuggled mainly to China, Thailand, Australia, Japan and Korea. Indonesia was a haven for "Ecstasy" makers, although not as big a producer as the Netherlands.

UN officials say amphetamine factories can be easily hidden, unlike heroin and cocaine production facilities, and it is easy to recruit legal companies to produce precursor chemicals. But no reliable data exists on the quantity produced.