BERN, Switzerland (MindaNews / 16 Oct) – In July this year I entered a local hospital as an unusual emergency case. In fact the Klinik Permanence said mine might be the first operation ever in the hospital to retrieve a fish bone stu ck in the throat.
I was put on full sedation and to my relief, the operation was over in half an hour. But the cost of the operation was high and scanning the hospital bill later, I found out that I was administered a small amount of the opioid Fentanyl, a sedative that in the Philippines had found notoriety as former President Rodrigo Duterte’s alleged drug of choice.
I remembered the onset of the drug as a deliciously warm feeling which had slowly, slowly dropped me to sleep, without dreams or disturbance of any sort, and I had woken up clear-minded.
I imagine the former president Digong will now need more of that sedative effect after Royina Garma, which lawmakers suspect was his ex-lover (for what could catapult her to the highest PCSO post despite her lack of academic background and training for that?), claimed that Duterte had used intelligence funds as reward money for the killings that resulted in his drug war.
Duterte and his clique of advisers might have thought that they had effectively paid or coerced officers and the men in the national police to enforce the brutal policies of the drug war.
Never had they thought of the scenario of those officers now revealing the true conduct of that war in the ongoing investigations in Congress.
Perhaps they had thought their lives would never change, just a few years after a new government took over. Perhaps they had read the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who had meditated that people will be just doing the exact same thing throughout history: “marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power.”
But life throws c urve balls, and now those errant balls have struck the former president and the team that he had formed to implement his controversial war on drugs.
The revelations that the retired police officer Garma and other potential witnesses will spring during the investigations will be painful to Duterte and his cohorts, like fish bones that are swallowed and get lodged in the throat, there to torment the victim unceasingly.
And a decidedly un-Stoic phrase will be used by the families of those who were killed in the war on drugs: “Indeed, karma is a bitch.”
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Brady Eviota wrote and edited for the now defunct Media Mindanao News Service in Davao and also for SunStar Cagayan de Oro. He is from Surigao City and now lives in Bern, the Swiss capital located near the Bernese Alps.)