Employment awaits druggies who reform in Cavite

A MAN wearing a baller band bearing President Duterte’s name gets his fingerprints taken for documentation during the mass surrender of drug dependents at the Rosario town hall in Cavite province on Sunday. MARIANNE BERMUDEZ

SUSPECTED illegal drug users and pushers continue to troop to police stations and local government centers in Southern Tagalog provinces, but some officials are offering those who turned themselves in a chance at reform.

In the coastal town of Rosario in Cavite province, for instance, local officials have offered drug suspects livelihood opportunities so they can start a new life away from drug abuse.

“These people did not have jobs—the very reason they would be given livelihood opportunities to discourage them [from drug use],” said Chief Insp. Mark Joseph Laygo, Rosario police chief.

After President Duterte promised an all-out war against illegal drugs and criminality, the country has seen a wave of surrender of drug users and pushers. The death toll in the police’s antidrug campaign has also increased, with suspects either dying in gunfights with policemen or turning up dead as victims of supposed vigilante killings.

Laygo said the Rosario government was planning to conduct a skills assessment to see whether they could be hired by factories inside Rosario’s industrial zone.

On Sunday, at least 729 people included in the Rosario police’s drug watch list surrendered to authorities. They filled up a covered court near the Rosario Elementary School starting at 5 a.m., as the deadline set by the town government for them to surrender was pushed until Sunday midnight. The town government earlier set a July 9 ultimatum for drug suspects to turn themselves in but this was reset due to bad weather.

Laygo warned those who would fail to beat the deadline that they would become targets of police operations and placed under surveillance.

The police, he said, would prepare profiles of the suspects, most of whom claimed to be using “shabu” (methamphetamine hydrochloride) or marijuana.

The Rosario government earlier announced its plan to hold arrested drug users and pushers, especially those who have become uncontrollable, inside a steel cage.

Drawn by a multicab, the so-called “cage of change” would be paraded around town as a warning to others.

“I think [the idea of being held in the ‘cage of change’] did have some psychological effect [on drug dependents]. They got scared,” Laygo said.

In the Mimaropa (Mindoro, Marinduque, Romblon, Palawan) region, police said at least 480 drug users and 102 drug pushers have surrendered since July 1.

In a statement, Chief Supt. Wilben Mayor, regional police director, said three policemen in the region also tested positive for drug use. With a report from Madonna T. Virola, Inquirer Southern Luzon