Zubiri Supports Increased Budget for PDEA in Duterte’s Drug War

Zubiri will support to increase PDEA’s budget from P1,014,236,000.00 to P1,217,521,000.00, or at 2.04% increase.

He also recommends increasing the budget for intelligence gathering and operations. He called on the PDEA “to hire more agents as stated in PDEA’s mandate wherein an anti-drugs team should be formed on a per province and city basis nationwide, not like the current practice of assigning a team per region only.”

Zubiri noted that “a third of the reasons for the low prosecution rate of PDEA cases are procedural like ineffective prosecution due to inefficient handling of evidence, failure of PDEA agents to appear in hearings and weak prosecution service”. Zubiri said, however, we see that the agents also deserve more support by way of more lawyers rendering legal services for them.

“At the same time, that we support your additional requests in the budget, we hope the PDEA will also support us by cleansing their ranks.”