By: Jhoanna Ballaran – @inquirerdotnet
INQUIRER.net / 10:18 AM July 30, 2017
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/918781/joma-duterte-is-no-1-drug-addict
If there is one person who stands as the police’s “most fitting target” in their violent crackdown on illegal drugs, it is the country’s’ “number 1” addict, President Rodrigo Duterte, Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder Jose Maria Sison said on Sunday.
In the latest episode of their word war, Sison sneered at Duterte’s use of Fentanyl, a highly potent opioid that the President allegedly uses to ease the pain from spinal injuries he incurred after a motorcycle accident.
“As an addict user of the opioid Fentanyl, Duterte is the No. 1 drug addict in the Philippines and is the most fitting target of the police units that he has turned into death squads and corrupted with money and promotions,” Sison said in a statement.
“But many people, including his so-called diehard supporters, are waking up to the fact that the illegal drug trade continues to thrive even in Bilibid and that Duterte has been favoring certain drug lords by delivering the street market to them where the low-level pushers of other drug syndicates have been slaughtered,” he added.
In a Davao speech last February, Duterte admitted in public that he took more than the required dosage of Fentanyl as it did not just relieve his pain, but it also felt “like cloud nine.”
“Iyung Fentanyl, the doctor stopped it because he got mad. I’m supposed to cut it into four pieces. Eh there was a time na ‘yung buo nilagay ko because more than just the disappearance of pain, you feel that you are on cloud nine. Para bang everything is okay with the world, nothing to worry about,” he said.
‘Coward’
Sison criticized Duterte’s “cowardly” act of killing suspected poor drug users and peddlers, while retracting his previous public threats against suspected Cebu-based drug lord Peter Lim, and alleged protectors of drug syndicates, former Pangasinan governor Amado Espino Jr. and General Marcelo Garbo.
“But he has enjoyed the most the mass murder of suspected poor drug users and pushers in the urban slums by the thousands (estimated at 8,000 to 12,000) and has openly assured the obvious murderers in authority that they have the license to kill with impunity,” Sison said.
“Duterte is overconfident that the poor victims, their families and even institutions cannot stand and fight against his presidential power,” he added.
Sison said Duterte “has incited the people and revolutionary forces to resist his oppressive rule” because of his hardline policies involving “martial rule” and other methods like “abduction and murder as well as indiscriminate bombings and artillery fire that victimize entire communities.” CBB/rga