New work for ex-drug users: Casket makers

OLONGAPO CITY – There’s life for drug users here who have surrendered to local officials: they will be trained and later employed as casket makers.

Olongapo City Mayor Rolen Paulino inaugurated on Thursday, September 29, the Casket Manufacturing and Training Facility here, which was built largely from the mayor’s social development fund. 

The facility will help train surrenderers of “Oplan TokHang,” one of the elements of the Duterte administration’s war on drugs, which involves policemen going house-to-house and knock on doors of suspected drug users and dealers to give them a chance to change their ways.

Critics said the core component of the anti-drugs campaign is extrajudicial killings, an accusation denied by Duterte officials.

So why did the city build a casket-making center?

Paulino said – without elaborating – that it’s more expensive to give each family a burial assistance of P5,000. So he found it wiser to train and hire drug surrenderers to make caskets.

The facility, located at the city hall’s engineering complex, aims to finish 4 caskets a day with “reformist-workers” who will be trained by seasoned casket makers from the towns of San Matias and Santo Tomas in Pampanga, according to the mayor. 

Angelito Caparas, 44, a former welder and electrician who surrendered during “Oplan TokHang,” was among the first trainees. He admitted he doesn’t do carpentry but is willing to learn.

Paulino warned the so-called reformists not to return to drugs or they might end up using the caskets they’re going to make. 

The mayor wasn’t joking. – Randy Datu in Olongapo City/Rappler.com