MANILA – The Philippine National Police (PNP) on Monday vowed to intensify its anti-illegal drug operations in the wake of reports claiming that that there has been an oversupply of shabu on the streets of Metro Manila that led to its price reduction.
“As I have said, if it is true that shabu supply is overflowing, we will not blame anybody here but we will double our efforts to recover that and if some really slipped into the country, we at the PNP will do our best to wipe out all these tons of shabu (allegedly from) the magnetic lifters,” the PNP chief said.
Albayalde was referring to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency’s (PDEA) claims that the four magnetic lifters recovered in General Mariano Alvarez (GMA), Cavite contained shabu that already found its way to the streets.
“Based on our (anti-drug) efforts on the streets, it is still the same. We do not have information that the price of shabu was reduced,” Albayalde said in a press briefing after Monday’s flag ceremony.
Albayalde also clarified that only the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB), not the police or the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), could determine if shabu prices have indeed decreased.
“I cannot second guess the PDEA on how they obtained that statistics. As per experience, we do not know, we cannot validate it as of this time if the price indeed decreased or there is an overflow of supply of drugs especially here in Metro Manila,” Albayalde told reporters.
PDEA Director General Aaron Aquino earlier said the oversupply of shabu led to the reduction of price especially in Metro Manila.
Aquino said samples from the intercepted shabu shipment from two magnetic lifters at the Manila International Container Port (MICP) and pieces of drug evidence seized from recent anti-drug operations are linked together, as proven by the correlation patterns established by the impurity profiling analysis.
These scientific findings support the claims of Aquino that shabu is flooding the streets as further indicated by the sudden drop in the price of shabu which is now at PHP1,400 per gram from PHP6,800 per gram in July.
Impurity drug profiling is a scientific tool applying chemical and physical techniques to determine if a relation exists between illicit drug seizures and the significance of such relationship.
Aquino said the similarity match or strong correlation of samples where the correlation values is greater or equal to 0.98 (range is 0.98 – 1.0) obtained from a statistical tool, cluster analysis, means that they came from the same manufacturer and same method of production.
In this case, the shabu came from the Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Lao PDR, Thailand) drug syndicate and was transported to different destinations.
He added that the procedure used by PDEA Laboratory Service (LS) for the profiling of shabu is similar to the one established and validated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the software used for the statistical data analysis of impurity patterns is used in Japan and introduced by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to the agency.
“The profiling analysis of shabu recovered from Bureau of Customs–MICP on Aug. 7, 2018, the one seized from Congressional Ave. corner Hereford St., Barangay Bahay Toro, Quezon City on Aug. 1, and those seized along Ronquillo St., Sta. Cruz Manila, showed that the impurity patterns are of high similarity, where the correlation value between sample is 0.999, indicating a strong correlation among them,” he added.
“PDEA wishes to clarify that we are not doing this to discredit any counterpart agencies but rather only to support our claims that we believe shabu supply is abundant and impurity profiling revealed that they are similar to the shabu that was recovered from the magnetic lifters at MICP,” Aquino said. (Christopher Lloyd Caliwan/PNA)
