Published: 10:18 a.m., July 30, 2017 | Updated: 5:38 p.m., July 30, 2017

President Rodrigo Duterte, as the country’s “No. 1 drug addict,” should be the “most fitting target” of the Philipine National Police (PNP) in its violent crackdown on illegal drugs, Jose Maria Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) said on Sunday.

In this latest episode of his raging word war with the President, Sison sneered at Duterte’s use of Fentanyl, a highly potent opioid that the president allegedly uses to ease the pain from spinal injuries he incurred after a motorcycle accident.

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“As an addict user of the opioid Fentanyl, Duterte is the No. 1 drug addict in the Philippines and is the most fitting target of the police units that he has turned into death squads and corrupted with money and promotions,” Sison said in a statement.

“But many people, including his so-called diehard supporters, are waking up to the fact that the illegal drug trade continues to thrive even in Bilibid and that Duterte has been favoring certain drug lords by delivering the street market to them where the low-level pushers of other drug syndicates have been slaughtered,” he added.

In a speech in Davao City last February, Duterte admitted in public that took more than the required dosage of Fentanyl because it not only relieved his pain but made him feel like he was on “cloud nine.”

“Iyung Fentanyl, the doctor stopped it because he got mad,” Duterte said. “I’m supposed to cut it into four pieces. Eh there was a time na ‘yung buo nilagay ko because more than just the disappearance of pain, you feel that you are on cloud nine. Para bang everything is okay with the world, nothing to worry about.”

‘Coward’

Sison criticized Duterte’s “cowardly” act of killing suspected poor drug users and peddlers while retracting his previous public threats against suspected Cebu-based drug lord Peter Lim and two alleged protectors of drug syndicates – former Pangasinan Gov. Amado Espino Jr. and retired Deputy Director General Marcelo Garbo, former PNP deputy chief for administration.

“But he has enjoyed the most the mass murder of suspected poor drug users and pushers in the urban slums by the thousands (estimated at 8,000 to 12,000) and has openly assured the obvious murderers in authority that they have the license to kill with impunity,” Sison said.

“Duterte is overconfident that the poor victims, their families and even institutions cannot stand and fight against his presidential power,” he added.

Sison said Duterte “incited the people and revolutionary forces to resist his oppressive rule” because of his hardline policies involving “martial rule” and other methods like “abduction and murder as well as indiscriminate bombings and artillery fire that victimize entire communities.”

READ: Duterte challenges Joma to ‘return home and fight here’

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‘Out of his mind’

Sison said Duterte was “out of his mind” and “out of touch with reality” for ordering government troops to “wipe out” the NPA, which has been waging war in the countryside for almost 50 years.

“He cannot finish off in five years an armed revolutionary movement deeply rooted among the toiling masses of workers and peasants who are fighting for national and social liberation against the big compradors and landlords represented now by him,” Sison said in another statement.

The CPP founder said the NPA fighters were “highly principled” and “sharp” enough understand the “evil scheme of the US-Duterte regime to combine martial rule and Tokhang methods of mass murder, and ready to fight these effectively.”

On Saturday, presidential spokesperson Ernesto Abella called Sison “out of touch” with his people on the ground, who had become “plain criminals” and “extortionists.”

Duterte earlier dared Sison to come home to the Philippines and fight here. But Sison maintained that he would come home on his “own terms.” CBB/rga/atm

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