LA TRINIDAD, Benguet – Some seventy-seven drug surrenderers in the municipality are expected to complete their community-based and outpatient rehabilitation program next month.
Chief Inspector Benson Macliing, chief of the La Trinidad Municipal Police Station, said the 77 drug surrenderees have been validated as bonafide residents of the town and had been subjected to the 7-month community-based and outpatient rehabilitation program designed to integrate them into mainstream society.
“We continue to be vigilant on the drug situation in our municipality. We hope that we will be able to maintain our status as drug cleared because there had been no more drug suspects that were validated in the town over the past two months,” Macliing stressed.
Earlier, he revealed there was a total of 236 drug surrenderers who actually gave themselves up to the police at the height of the government’s crackdown on illegal drugs in the municipality.
However, he explained that some of the recorded drug surrenderers were said to have gone home to their home provinces as they were transient residents of the municipality and the La Trinidad Municipal Police Office already endorsed their names to the concerned police stations in their places for validation and monitoring purposes.
According to him, personnel of the local drug enforcement unit had been instructed to continue working double time to prevent drug personalities from pursuing the illegal drug trade in the municipality.
Aside from undergoing series of lectures by the police, Macliing added the drug surrenderers also undergo the regular treatment from health workers and counseling from social workers so they can abandon the use of illegal drugs and become productive individuals in the community.
Macliing disclosed apart from the absence of apprehended drug pushers or users in the municipality over the past one and a half month, the number of crimes in the municipality is also on a downtrend following the intensive campaign of the combined police operatives and anti-narcotics agents to curb the illegal drugs trade and use in the municipality and sustain the implementation of peacekeeping initiatives geared towards making the town a better place to study, work, live and do business.
He claimed even in the La Trinidad vegetable trading post where most of the drug personalities were monitored to have been doing their illegal drug trade in the past, did not record any presence of drug pushers or users since the intensified anti-drug operations plus the fact that the supply of drugs has become too difficult to access.
He urged local residents to be vigilant on what is happening in their neighbourhood and report to the nearest police station illegal activities of unscrupulous individuals so that the police can validate their activities to sustain the peace and order of the municipality.
By HENT
