FRANCISCO S. TATAD
I TRIED to tread very gently when I asked in my August 16, 2017 column, “Have we truly become a full-blown narco-state?” I did not want to be in President Rodrigo Duterte’s crosshairs by suggesting that anyone in his circle might be working with the Chinese drug lords in flooding the country with shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride) from Xiamen. But 605 kilograms of the stuff worth P6.4 billion had breezed through the Bureau of Customs’ “green lane,” like a government-to-government transfer; and DU30 himself declared: “The Philippines is now a narco-state.”