Lawmakers welcome Duterte’s drug testing bill: We hope he will defend it

Davao City 1st District Rep. Paolo Duterte | PHOTO: Official facebook page of City Government of Davao

MANILA, Philippines — The Majority bloc at the House of Representatives has welcomed Davao City 1st District Rep. Paolo Duterte’s proposal to require drug testing for all elected officials, with the hope that he will attend the committee hearing to defend his bill.

In a press briefing on Tuesday, Davao Oriental 2nd District Rep. Cheeno Almario, PBA party-list Rep. Margarita Nograles, Taguig 2nd District Rep. Amparo Maria Zamora, and 1-Rider party-list Rep. Ramon Rodrigo Gutierrez were asked about Duterte’s House Bill (HB) No. 10744, which seeks to amend the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002.

“On its face, it seems the proposed law is good. We haven’t had the time yet to read specifically what is in there, but I think that’s the challenge for those who study the law…In what words was it couched? Would it be able to pass that constitutional barrier from previous iterations? And I think that’s what is hard here,” Gutierrez said.

“It’s easy to file bills, it’s easy to place good-sounding explanatory notes which may be clickbait or catchy, but it really comes down to the quality of the legislation. And I think we’re excited, hopefully, to see our esteemed colleague attend the hearings and defend this bill, and we’d like to see his opinions on how this would pass through the committee,” he added.

Zamora also believes that Rep. Duterte’s intentions in filing the bill are good.

“We are more excited with him joining us for committee hearings,” she added.

Nograles and Almario said that while lawmakers are always welcome to craft bills, these must be for the greater good of the people and must not target specific individuals.

“The intent should be good and I hope the intent for this is good,” Nograles said.

“I hope he gets to defend the bill and he has good intentions about this, and to defend this, you have to be able to attend the committee hearing and not pass it on to someone else. So if this is his bill, we respect it. It will go through the process. I just hope he will be able to show that he is doing this not for any vindication or anything. It’s not to single out someone because that will be unconstitutional,” she added.

Almario, meanwhile, said that while they are aware of the recent political situation in the country, he hopes “there is no personal agenda involved in the filing of the bill.”

“What we do here in the House is to always look at the Filipino people. If the intent is for the Filipino people, we welcome them to file any kind of bill…But we hope to see that there should be less amounts of personal agendas in the filing of bills and more towards the vision of a better country,” he added.

Duterte on Tuesday confirmed that he filed HB No. 10744 on Monday. It seeks to require a hair follicle drug test from elected and appointed officials. The hair follicle test will be an initial assessment, and a urine drug test will be used as a confirmatory test.

Drug testing through a hair follicle is the same test that critics of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. have asked him to undergo to disprove allegations that he is using illegal drugs.

Rep. Duterte’s father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, has linked Marcos to drug use.

In November 2021 — before the campaign season for the 2022 polls — the older Duterte claimed that one of the presidential candidates used cocaine, which many believed was Marcos.

Marcos has denied this, submitting himself to a drug test days after Duterte’s assertion. The result of the test came out negative.

READ: ‘It’s the fentanyl,’ Marcos says after former president Duterte tags him ‘drug addict’

Last January, Marcos refused to give weight to the former president’s accusations, saying that it might be the fentanyl acting up.

The older Duterte has admitted to using fentanyl, a strong painkiller that is said to be more potent than morphine and heroin.