Drug-war president accused of addiction

EXILED Communist Party of the Philippines founding chairman José María “Joma” Sison issued a strong message against Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war on Sunday, dubbing the unpredictable president an opioid addict and “a coward through and through”, hours before a pre-dawn raid in Mindanao claimed the life of a mayor, his wife and 10 others.

“He is crazed by power and Fentanyl,” Sison said.

Reynaldo Parojinog, the mayor of Ozamiz city, was killed in a gun battle with police who arrived to serve a search warrant at his home, according to officials.

Guns chambered for powerful rounds and an unspecified amount of methamphetamine were recovered, Timoteo Pacleb, chief of police of Northern Mindanao, said.

The Ozamiz mayor is the third mayor to be killed in the government’s grisly narcotics crackdown.

“The Parojinogs, if you would recall, are included in Duterte’s list of personalities involved in the illegal drug trade,” Ernesto Abella, the president’s spokesperson, said.

Duterte has promised to intensify the war on drugs, rejecting criticisms from those he claims are “trivialising” his campaign with human rights concerns.

Sison, 78, has lived in exile in the Netherlands following years of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship, which ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. A former college instructor to Duterte, Sison excoriated his former student as a hypocrite and coward on Sunday.

“As an addict user of the opioid Fentanyl, Duterte is the number one 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.

Duterte has admitted to overusing the painkiller Fentanyl – a powerfully addictive opiate – to treat a serious motorcycle injury. Saying that he took more than the recommended dosage because it made him feel that he was “on cloud nine”, Duterte also denied his dependency on the drug. – teleSUR