EDITORIAL - Next administration should be able to handle drug problem

Last April 24, a man was arrested with a whopping P68 million worth of shabu. Before that day ended, police would end up with a total of P103 million worth of drugs seized in separate buy-bust operations.

This shows us illegal drugs continues to be a very big problem. And it seems it was not addressed as promised by this administration. A fact that President Rodrigo Duterte himself admitted during a speech given during the inauguration of the CCLEX recently.

“When I became president, I said, ‘I can clean it in six months.’ And after that, I realized, I was really wrong... Maybe it’s hubris. It was campaign time, we were all full of bluster during the campaign,” President Duterte said.

It is easy to dwell on this alone and call President Duterte out for this failure which was one his biggest campaign promises --among his other campaign promises also left unfulfilled. It becomes easy to point out that he underestimated how big the drug problem was and overestimated how good he was going to be at solving it.

But that won’t do much good since he has no more than a few months in his presidency. Doing so doesn’t really help the situation either, so let his moment of hubris be water under the CCLEX.

Although now, this same drug problem will have to be passed on to the next administration, a problem that seems to have been made worse by the inconsistent policies of this one. Not to mention the violent approach it seems to have taken and prioritized in dealing with this malady. Instead of focusing on reducing the demand for drugs, it decided it was going to war against the small-time drug peddlers while leaving the drug lords largely untouched.

Our choice for the next president and the next batch of government officials should be those who take the drug situation seriously and not cavalierly.

We should choose officials who can chart a better course where the drug problem is concerned. If nothing else, let how this administration approached the drug problem teach us how not to carry out a campaign against drugs.