Shabu-toke it once and you’re addicted

When Mount Pinatubo spewed ash over Luzon in 1991, a gang of addicts in San Pablo City danced in the street, hailing "a shower of shabu." But the synthetic drug methamphetamine hydrochloride was introduced to the Philippines much earlier, under less open or eruptive means. Narc agents differ in accounts of when or where exactly the first shipment came. They agree, however, that by the mid-80s, shabu already had notched instant hit, replacing expensive cocaine and cumbersome marijuana as the drug of choice by curious teenagers and bored adults. Shabu has since grown into a national menace, inducing the commission of heinous crimes, accounting for billions of pesos in monthly sales, and threatening to turn the country into a narcostate like Colombia.

The US Drug Enforcement Agency reports that "crystal meth," the first amphetamine derivative of any significance, was synthesized in 1919 by a Japanese chemist. Its use became prevalent in post-War Japan among construction workers who used shabu to energize themselves for longer working hours and bigger pay. Earliest records of mass production were traced to Korea. But strict laws against narcotrade forced the makers to shift to Taiwan, then the Philippines, and lately to China’s southern coast.

The Yakuza operated the first shabu laboratories in the Philippines in 1984. The gangsters targetted the lucrative US market at the time, and made several shipments of "ice" to the West Coast via Hawaii that peaked in the summer of 1988. That was the same period when crack cocaine also flooded the East Coast from Colombia. A consequent tight watch on US docks resulted in the arrest of several Japanese, Korean and Hong Kong gang leaders. The Yakuza changed tack and started manufacturing shabu right in California, Oregon and Washington.

The Yakuza sold the drug to Filipinos as well. Among the first to be hooked, by their own accounts, were entertainment stars who needed that extra boost of energy. Eventually, yuppies joined the craze, searching in shabu an answer to or escape from their empty workaday lives. At the time, shabu was mostly injected or snorted. Eventually, new packaging in smaller quantities and large-scale manufacturing made the drug available at lower prices. Slum- and farm-dwellers soon discovered the "joy and ecstacy" that their screen and stage idols or rich bosses and landlords found in the drug. New paraphernalia, notably glass pipes or tooters, came into use as smoking became the most popular way of ingesting shabu.

Shabu is now peddled in all barangays. Village leaders lament that unemployed and underemployed residents are not only the users but the sellers. A television program recently featured the various persons and ways involved in the narcotrade at the grassroots. The itinerant cigarette vendor or the neighborhood labandera would walk around dark, muddy alleys looking for the usual or new buyers. The shabu would be packed in cellophane sachets hidden in the pockets. Or the cook in the small corner-eatery would slip it into a sandwich. Barangay chairman Martin Dino of San Francisco Del Monte, Quezon City, where teenage rape victim Baby Echegarray resides, says that the stuff is sometimes even concealed in the diapers of infants used by street pushers as innocent props for their trade. He recalls from case records that when Baby was still barely in her teens, her stepfather, who would later be convicted and executed for raping her, had ordered her several times to deliver shabu to neighbor-buyers. Now who would suspect a child of being a drug courier?

Barangay leaders are tasked with peace and order in their locales. But they complain that the law is not on their side. Dino laments that he and fellow-officials were once charged with violating the human rights of a known street pusher whom they frisked for shabu. "Now we’re scared to accost even the most open drug peddlers," he says, "even if we know he’s carrying shabu in his pockets."

It’s worse than that. Other barangay leaders have long been complaining that antidrug laws are too outdated to deal with the present shabu scourge. The Dangerous Drugs Act, for one, classifies a pusher as one caught with at least one-fourth kilo of shabu. Worth half a million pesos, the stuff would not make him eligible for bail. Anyone with less than that quantity can thus get off the hook - and post bail - as a mere user who needs rehabilitation. Yet shabu is now sold in such small vials of one gram for P1,000 to one toot for P100.

Street pushers earn about 30 percent of the daily take. So the labandera would rather sell ten toots for an afternoon’s income of P300, than wash and iron clothes the whole day and night for P200.

Shabu is not only cheaper to procure but also easier to ingest than cocaine. Also called "ice" or "bato", it is said to have "clean" or white smoke because of its lower melting point than "crack" which has "dirty" or brown smoke. Users prefer shabu for coca too because of the quicker, longer effect. They get an instant high just seven seconds from toking it, and the trip lasts for six to eight hours; whereas coke takes effect after about 20 minutes and lasts for half an hour to about four hours.

Sadly, one can become an instant addict to shabu, too, from just the first toot or toke. One out of four first-time users get hooked because the synthetic drug mixes with natural chemicals in the body that induce craving. Such addiction leads to paranoia (praning, as users say), loss of appetite, irritability, anxiety, agression, nervousness, hallucinations, insomnia, increased blood pressure and convulsions.

Only when the addiction triggers psychoses do most users seek treatment. But that, again, is a problem. The country has very few drug rehabilitation centers to accommodate the estimated 1.8 million shabu addicts and 3.5 million occasional users. In many accounts, the centers did not really wipe out the addiction but expanded the markets of drug distributers. Users meet new contacts in the centers from whom to buy shabu when they get out after a few months.

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