A 10-year-old child is already hooked on shabu in the Philippines, an official of the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) told a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
DDB Assistant Secretary Benjamin Reyes made the revelation in response to a question by Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, who asked the age at which a person gets hooked on the illegal drug.
“Sa survey ay 10 years old,” Reyes told Gatchalian and members of the Senate committee on finance during deliberations on the DDB’s proposed budget for 2017.
Asked where the child got the shabu, the DDB official said, “From kaibigan.” (a friend)
“In fact, gumagamit sila sa bahay ng kaibigan,” Reyes said, citing DDB data. (They have pot sessions inside the house of a friend)
“We were surprised. Akala namin pusher ang main source pero lumalabas kaibigan,” he added. (We thought a pusher was the main source. It turned out, it was a friend.)
Before this, Reyes told the committee that according to data gathered by the board, a six-year-old child was already using rugby, a thick chemical adhesive which is sniffed by users.
“Ano yun, binibigyan ng magulang para siguro hindi magutom?” asked committee chair Senator Loren Legarda. (How come? Did the parents give the rugby to suppress hunger?)
“That’s the assumption, Madam chair,” Reyes said, noting that most rugby users lived in the streets.
With the government’s intensified campaign against illegal drugs, the DDB expects one million drug dependents to surrender before the end of the year. It would cost the government P4 billion to rehabilitate all of them, Reyes said.
But he pointed out that only one percent of those who surrender undergo “in-patient” rehabilitation, while two to 10 percent are outpatients.
Majority, or 90 percent of drug users, he said, will be given community-based treatment and rehabilitation interventions, such as briefing, and motivational counseling.
“Community-based interventions are given to persons with mild substance use disorders. Ito yung mga gumamit, user pa lang, nag-e-experiment. So, we can still provide community based interventions at the community level,” Reyes said./rga