Drugs ending up in interior areas: Pemadam
Published on: Monday, May 20, 2019
By: Johan Aziz
KENINGAU: Members of the public always find it shocking whenever they learn about civil servants being arrested on suspicion of involvement in drugs, says District Pemadam Chairman Faimin Kamin.
To this, he said that it makes the agency’s work a lot harder when dealing with cases involving people in the government service as there are lines it just cannot cross.
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He said there is a limit to what Pemadam is capable of carrying out.
“People perceive us as an enforcement agency, which we are not. But we always work with other agencies like the police in the fight against drugs,” he explained.
According to Faimin, the agency views drug abuse by civil servants as a serious matter that must be dealt with at its roots.
He also expressed concern about the how drugs are now getting deeper into the interior areas of Sabah because many places are now becoming accessible by road.
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“When the Sipitang-Tenom road was opened, we saw a pattern of drug abuse cases involving the people in Tenom. I know this from experience as I had served as District Officer and also as a Second Class Magistrate in Tenom,” he said.
Faimin said he had seen many sad stories about families of people who fell victim to drugs.
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“I have seen parents who had to mortgage their land just to pay off their child’s penalty,” he said.
But what was more saddening, he said, was to see the victims refusal to repent because they knew their parents would always bail them out of their crime.
“The problem why drug addicts cannot kick their addiction is because they are protected by their own parents. This is due to the fact that the parents themselves cannot accept the reality that their child is involved in drugs,” he said.
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