Party over for San Juan drug supplier

Hours after President Duterte declared in his State of the Nation Address that the government’s war on drugs would remain “relentless,” San Juan City police arrested an alleged supplier of party drugs who had evaded arrest for years.

A report by Senior Supt. Bowenn Joey Masauding, the city police chief, identified the suspect as Ireneo Faraon III, a 40-year-old resident of Barangay Pasadena who also went by the alias “Neo” on the local drug watch list.

Trapped

A team from the drug enforcement unit had Faraon trapped in a buy-bust operation at the corner of F. Santos and N. Domingo Streets in Barangay Ermitanio around 7:20 p.m. on Monday.

The suspect arrived on a Yamaha motorbike without a license plate and handed a sachet of suspected “shabu” (crystal meth) worth P500 to an undercover agent.

A search in his motorbike’s compartment yielded three more sachets of suspected ecstasy tablets, police said.

Senior Insp. Edwin Malabanan, head of the city police’s antidrug unit, said Faraon had been a longtime target who managed to evade arrest for years.

11 times in rehab

“Since there are not that many bars here in San Juan, he sold the party drugs in bars and clubs along Quezon Avenue and in other areas in Quezon City,” Malabanan told the Inquirer on Wednesday. “He did not stay often here in San Juan.”

The suspect’s family had placed Faraon under a drug rehabilitation program as many as 11 times but he kept resuming his illegal activity, the official said.

Malabanan noted that Faraon’s arrest was San Juan police’s first successful operation against a party drug supplier in about two years.

Paraon remained in detention at the police station at press time.