TABUK CITY, Kalinga – More than P2.2 billion worth of marijuana plants were uprooted and torched into ashes by combined police operatives, anti-narcotics agents and military personnel during a four-day marijuana eradication campaign in a sixteen-hectare plantation site at Mount Chumanchil, Loccong, Tinglayan town recently.
Juvenal Azurin, regional director of the Cordillera office of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA-CAR), said the destroyed illegal hemp comprised of 11,605,250 pieces of fully grown marijuana, 220,000 grams of dried marijuana leaves and 45,000 grams of marijuana seedlings.
Government troops cleared the prohibited shrub from 18 cultivation sites covering 16.2655 hectares through six simultaneous operations.
Azurin said the latest marijuana eradication operation yielded the biggest haul in the history of marijuana eradication operations conducted by law enforcers in the different parts of the region over the past several decades.
“We will continue our unrelenting and uncompromising campaign against the cultivation of marijuana in remote villages of the region as our contribution in the government’s efforts to curb the proliferation of illegal drugs in the country,” Azurin stressed.
The PDEA-CAR official noted the marijuana produced in the far flung communities of the province is considered to be high grade compared to the marijuana produced in Benguet, La Union and Ilocos Sur, and it is the kind preferred by buyers for the extraction of the hashish oil being sold in various foreign countries.
Mount Chumanchil has been a production area of the illegal hemp over the past several decades that made Kalinga as one of the major producers of high grade marijuana patronized by local and foreign buyers.
The Cordillera has been the major source of almost 80 percent of the marijuana being circulated in the different parts of the country over the past several decades due to its weather that is suitable for the mass production of the illegal hemp.
Azurin disclosed no marijuana cultivator was arrested as the operating troops were detected leading to the former’s evacuation of the area.
It was learned that farmers in the highlands prefer to plant marijuana interspersed among their crops because of the high market value of hemp and marijuana does not need expensive farm inputs in order to grow unlike the agricultural crops.
Azurin appealed to marijuana cultivators, and personalities involved in the production and marketing of the drugs around the country, to give up their illegal activities the soonest because the government means business in the campaign against the proliferation of illegal drugs, and to reform their sources of livelihood if they do not want to suffer the consequences of their illegal activities.
By HENT