SOME MORNING THOUGHTS

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            One of the luxuries of retirement is to wake up in the morning without having to dress to go to work or do a job elsewhere.  And in the congenial space of home, you can lazily savor your coffee, taking all your time to read the newspaper and finding that there is no item in the news that riles you up.  But over time, this could become essentially routine and somehow boring as it was with me and I would look for or do other things to perk up the morning in addition to coffee.

              Somehow that has not been a problem since Rodrigo Duterte became president.  There are few mornings now that the newspapers do not carry an item of news or commentary on what he said or did and how he said or did it that does not agitate the better side of my human sensibilities in varying degrees and I would be induced to cogitate and contemplate on dark thoughts even.  Could be congenital or in the rearing but this President is really natural for rude and abrasive things.

              
               President Duterte has transferred the lead role in his drug war from the Philippine National Police (PNP) to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).  The memo for that was already signed with ceremony but I don't believe it for a moment that this will be the case in functional terms. This is another characteristic double talk of Mr. Duterte in writing.  It is not believable that he will  leave solely to the PDEA to pursue and execute his campaign against drugs, not in the scale and murderous manner it is being done on his orders and encouragement.  The PDEA simply does not have the budget and manpower to do it.  Its budget can, of course, be increased from presidential sources to buy more weapons or hire  gun men to add to its present personnel complement of only around 2,000 but that would not still approximate the PNP's capability; it already has plenty of weapons and almost 200,000 men excluding civilian hires for undercover missions as everyone knows or suspects.  Moreover, there would be no practical and effective way to keep many policemen, individuals or groups, away from the drug mess because of attractions inherent in the business or profession of enforcing the law.  In fact, this will be an added complication in the job of the PDEA to watch out for police interference in the guise of assistance, in addition to policing its own ranks.

         This move of the President strikes me as just a gambit, a temporary ploy to shift the focus and responsibility for the many drug killings still to happen on the PDEA and make it the scapegoat that will divert some of the heat off his PNP; an attempt to be clever in the face of mounting demands, domestic and international, for the investigations of thousands of extra-judicial killings attributed  to it, and done in compliance with Duterte's open orders.  Let us wait for the effects of its implementation but I predict it will make this drug campaign more messy and aggravating than it is now.

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