‘Less-bloody’ drug war has more impact, says new PDEA chief

VIP DRUG SUSPECT Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency chief Aaron Aquino presents Diane Uy after her arrest in a drug raid at her home near Malacañang. —MARIANNE BERMUDEZ

Tapped to lead the war on narcotics in which, it says, failure is not an option, the “less-bloody, high-impact” campaign of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) has made over 400 arrests across the country.

The arrests of drug personalities were the result of 1,341 operations it conducted from Oct. 10 which also yielded some P53.83 million worth of illegal drugs, according to the PDEA.

“Failure is never an option when we took upon the sole authority in bringing order to (the) country’s antidrug campaign,” PDEA Director General Aaron Aquino said.

“We may be undermanned, underequipped and underfunded, but we continually strive to achieve more than what is expected,” he added.

The PDEA budget for 2017 is P1.44 billion, which the Senate finance committee is planning to raise to P2.6 billion for 2018.  The agency manages with 1,041 field operatives nationwide.

Aquino said that despite the agency’s meager budget the PDEA was able to conduct a “high impact and quality” antinarcotics campaign that focused on high-value targets.

“This is 80.5 percent more than the (number of) operations conducted in the previous month. As a result, a 14.4-percent increase in the number of arrested drug personalities was recorded,” Aquino said.

The total value of seized illegal drugs, as well as controlled precursors and essential chemicals, also rose by over 200 percent, he said.

PDEA agents seized 6.16 kilograms of “shabu,” or crystal meth, worth about P30.8 million in a monthlong operation from Oct. 10, compared to P9.35 million in the previous month.

Among PDEA’s biggest achievements so far, according to Aquino, were the Oct. 25 arrest of Dhan Usman, who yielded P1 million worth of shabu in Taguig City; the Nov. 4 roundup of four persons and the confiscation of P6 million worth of shabu in Naga City; the bust on detained “shabu queen” Yu Yuk Lai at the Correctional Institute for Women and the subsequent arrest of her daughter on Nov. 6; and the buy-bust operation on Nov. 8 in Kawit, Cavite province, that led to the arrests of two Nigerian nationals who yielded some P6 million worth of shabu.

The PDEA also claimed that only one drug personality had been killed in over a thousand operations.

Derrick Arnold Carreon, PDEA spokesperson, said the fatality, former Army soldier Roel Valcurza Sahiron, had shot it out on Oct. 18 with PDEA agents who were about to search his home in Tagum City, Davao del Norte.

The agency considered Sahiron a high-value target because of his alleged involvement in the narcotics trade in Tagum, using his house as a drug den.

A search of Sahiron’s house yielded P45,000 worth of shabu, several tablets of pseudoephedrine, drug paraphernalia and two firearms, agents said.

A total of 6,225 drug-related deaths were recorded by the Philippine National Police between July 1 last year and September 2017, a month before it lost the lead role in the drug war to the PDEA.