FINDING A REASON TO CARE

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

In last week’s column, we reported the recommendations presented during consultations with drug addiction professionals on how to address this disturbing phenomenon brought about by the unrelenting campaign against drug users and pushers launched by the new administration. It was just a personal initiative with the modest aim to gather ideas on how to deal with what could develop into a major crisis.

As expected, only a few responded to our personal invitation.

We were quite heartened, however, with the quality of the sharing done in this small café named Crescencia, by the road in Poblacion, Baclayon, where incidentally dozens of drug users under rehabilitation gather every Wednesday night for their weekly sharing of experiences and reflections.

I summarized in my last column what I heard during this series of meetings with friends  inspired actually by our group’s reading of the Biblical passage on the Good Samaritan in our action group meeting (AGM), a regular activity of the Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals (BCBP) which I joined in 2015 as part of efforts to go back to my faith after years of doubt and skepticism. But that’s another story.

Brod  Irwyn Lumuthang and his wife, Sis Joy, who are our AGM facilitators, encouraged us to put into writing what could be done about having so many identified drug users left in the custody of their respective families waiting for further action by counselling or rehabilitation. Somebody joked that if they revert to the old ways of using or in some cases, actually selling drugs, bullets would surely come as their way of salvation.

A grim joke, but newspaper pictures of bloodied bodies by the road, in isolated places in some remote barangays, in crowded buses and terminals, all tend to show what could be expected if drug users and pushers return to their old ways. Effective psychological warfare images, but they may overshadow more caring and humanitarian ways to address drug addiction problems.

In having this overwhelming number of surrenderees, with Bohol, for instance, having 22,000 now and still counting, there’s no way you can go by the insane solution of just killing all of them to get rid of the problem; no way you can go shooting them down  like they are stray dogs, those who would revert to the old ways, for sheer lack of guns and bullets, not to mention the lack of bounty money to spread around and the various paper forms to fill to justify the killing and to have probably an official receipt of each killing required to collect the bounty. What a cruel country we have become to imagine this could happen at all!

I reported in last week’s column what the consultation participants shared with us during the meeting. For the benefit of LGUs and NGOs who are interested to access more information about services which can be used to formulate a strategy or simply to decide on what to do about these hundreds of identified drug users now in the custody of their respective families , let me give here some names and contact numberst: Jimmy Clemente, 0998 888 1559; Alain Alino, 0917 325 0252; Rene Francisco, 0918 908 8237; Epoy Jiffy Laroya, 0907 350 5041.

They run a network of around ten or more drug rehab centers in the Visayas and Mindanao and have announced their intention to adjust their admission fees and modify treatment procedures to cope with the thousands of drug users and pushers now identified and obviously pardoned but needing a systematic program of counselling and treatment.

Alain Alino visited Bohol last week to meet with government officers tasked to plan the government’s drug rehab center. He said he also accompanied them to the FARM It Works Balay Kahayag (FITWBK) drug rehab center in Laya, Baclayon to see first-hand what is being done in the facility.

Rene Francisco went around the province last week-end to look for venues for possible tent cities, his proposed strategy to cope with hundreds who have no access to treatment services. He is expected to attend a conference this weekend in Iloilo City  to discuss his recommended strategy.

For his part, Jimmy Clemente, is organizing what he calls a “Unity Conference” among drug abuse professionals from various drug rehabilitation centers this week-end in Iloilo City to be able to identify  collaborative approaches regarding drug rehabilitation which can be presented later to target LGUs and other agencies.

Meanwhile, Miriam P. Cue, noted psychologist originally from my adopted town, Baclayon, emailed last 18 July her proposed strategy since she could not make it to the consultation meeting on account of her usually tight work schedule at the New Day Rehabilitation Center in Davao City and her engagements with international organizations.

We meant to present her proposed strategy in this week’s column but we decided to post the entire strategy in our Facebook pages and blogs last week to make her ideas available to as many people as possible. It is timely to do so because provincial governments and the Municipal LGUs all over the country are preparing their respective plans on how to handle the situation of having hundreds of drug users waiting for some kind of treatment or counselling and I believe that her ideas will be quite useful at this time.

I have known her for more than two years for her work and that of her colleagues at the New Day Recovery Center (NDRC) in Davao City as part of our study of selected drug rehab centers in Visayas and Mindanao. This field research was undertaken prior to the establishment of Bohol's first drug rehab center managed since November last year by the It Works Chemical Dependency Treatment Center of Ozamis City and the Family and Recovery Management (FARM) center of Minglanilla, Cebu.

Miriam P. Cue from Baclayon, Bohol is one of the country's internationally-known drug addiction professional. She is always eager to lend her expertise to the Government and other sectors interested to be involved in this quite unique problem in Bohol and in the country where drug users and pushers have been identified, turning themselves in to police authorities, their numbers growing by leaps and bounds from day to day.

Her credentials is impeccable: Chairperson, Professional Regulatory Board of Psychology at the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC); Clinical Psychologist and Psychotherapist at NDRC Davao and internationally-known trainer of recovery coaches and other drug addiction professionals.I believe that her proposed strategy will be quite a valuable input to all sectors in Bohol and other provinces who are now preoccupied on how to handle a critical situation resulting from the surrender of thousands of drug users needing a systematic treatment program.

I have provided copies of her proposed strategy to government offices and NGOs who may be interested to implement her ideas. For this column, however, I will limit myself to the last section of her paper because I think it is something in which most of us who are not drug addiction professionals can assist.   Here is that portion of her paper she categorizes as Recovery Supports:

“a. Working with Clients through non-clinical services that are used with treatment to support     

individual clients in their recovery goals. This can be done by peers and self-help groups.

“b. Working with families through Community Based Programs. The families of all those

surrendered in particular, need to be educated and provided the appropriate supports.    

Many of them could be suffering from social stigma now. They may not know what to do

anymore,  with their confusion... their co-dependencies and their involvement with the

clients.

    

“These families were already affected before these users/peddlers surrendered; and these   

users/peddlers will go back to their families after treatment and/or intervention. Build and foster health, resilience, wellness and quality of life through the transition of  individual clients  and client families within the network of families and recovery partners in the community.

“These families and recovery partners play a very critical role in recovery and they can also be tapped for essential supports to our rehabilitation efforts. 

“Seek help from the DOH, establish linkages with the Church and various church/faith groups, with the DDB and other government institutions, with UNODC, with rehabilitation centers and facilities, SUD [Substance Use Disorder] treatment professionals and other treatment-providers outside Bohol for needed supports.

“Not all may need treatment. Some of them may only need psycho-social support in their efforts to find acceptance, amnesty, redemption and reintegration.

“Please realize as well that SUD treatment for the parolees, and/or probationers (whatever you call these offenders) differ from the treatment of those who have not been in conflict with the law and/or those in jail or in prison. Their freedom may be curtailed but they still have greater access to drugs and alcohol than those who are incarcerated, hence, the greater potential for relapse and recidivism. 

“Many of the "surrenderees" may have a co-occurring anti-social personality disorder, or a conduct disorder (for those below 18); many of them may be spiritually empty and financially impoverished.

“Securing their basic needs such as food and shelter, re-examining their values, helping them see the meaning of their life and purpose in this world, and providing more intensive psychotherapy among other treatment strategies to address the co-occuring problem, should help them reintegrate into society.”

Those of us who are not drug addiction professionals will find in this portion of the proposed strategy justification to get more involved. No special qualification required to help facilitate services to reach these drug users, most of them may not need a rehabilitation center to recover. We need not be psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers, as well as doctors and nurses, to assume a role in the current crisis to cope with having thousands of self-confessed drug addicts in our midst, some of them are close friends and relatives.

We need only to find a reason to care. For comments, email: npestelos@gmail.com

###NMP/21 July 2016/1.06 p.m.