G Spot
Narco-politics and vegetables
By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo
TESS de Venecia, one of my best friends, and Regional Director of Women in Development (WID) Foundation, is now resting in heaven. But now she comes to mind, having realized that the society we are trying to change is in much greater danger than we thought.
Tess spoke to me about the creeping plague of narco-politics in Pangasinan. It is not the first time she dragged me into something I have no expertise in dealing with, but it is the first time that I saw the impact of drugs on people and their families.
Several years ago, mainly because of love, she put someone close to her family to rehab, despite objections from some members of the victim’s family, because he was no longer coherent, he was no longer the intelligent, engaging lovable person she used to exchange wits with. His own mother hesitated, thinking how rehab could be a cold, alienating process, but in the end, two mothers, decided to have him on rehab. He went in and out of rehab, but on his last release, he took an overdose. The doctors declared him brain-dead, and the only thing he was able to do, on his own, was to breathe. He cannot think, speak or move. He was, according to some relatives, “in full state of vegetating”. A brain-dead or comatose person is said to be a vegetable when he has lost his faculties, and the only sign that he is alive is he is able to breathe. Similarly, “a person who is not doing anything, or one who lives in boredom and monotony can be said to be living the life of a vegetable.”
I do not mean to insult the vegetables by perpetrating the belief that they have no capacity to think. I cringe at the description, “He is a total vegetable!” Shouldn’t being called a vegetable be a compliment in these days when we are going organic?
A month after my first encounter with the comatose victim, Tess put a younger relative to rehab, justifying this act as an act of love once again. This case, unlike the first case that ended in slow death, resulted in a graduation, where the one who was being released, gave his valuable testimony to the audience composed of persons closest to him. That victory over a vice, his transformation, entitled him to be called a “survivor” from the vegetable patch.
Two years after, Armi Bangsal-Lorica, Provincial Director of the WID Foundation, called to seek appropriate intervention for a distraught mother whose daughter was abused by his own brother who was a drug addict. Having worked with the vulnerable sectors of society in Pangasinan, this came as a shock initially, but then it has occurred so often that the citizens have considered them commonplace, as commonplace as theft, victimizing members of their own families.
Now, it has become a scourge, not only for women, but children as well. Information reaching our provincial operation reveal that children in K-12 are being sold cheap shabu at two pesos each, and some of them are now being used as couriers. The drug menace has crept into the schools and the barangays, and there seems to be no way to ignore the complicity of some barangay officials from this sinister cabal.
So what are the local government units (LGUs) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) doing to strategically address this problem? Aside from occasionally apprehending peddlers, have they been able to put big operators in Pangasinan behind bars?
WID Foundation considers the proliferation of drug cases as anathema to the healthy growth of families and the empowerment of women. However, this problem is not within the competence of non-government organizations (NGOs) to address, they have limited resources to spend educating and backstopping a citizenry, some of whom are earning a living from the drug operation, and most of whom are afraid to do anything about it. The impunity is spitting on the faces of ordinary citizens and assaulting spaces that women hold sacred: their bodies and their families. We are in a state of war where the weapons are directed at the total destruction of women and young minds.
Decisive action is needed, pronto! Failure to act means we will all be brain-dead, and inevitably become “The Vegetable Capital of the North.”
(For your comments and reactions, please email to: punch.sunday@gmail.com)
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