In the midst of the issues surrounding the death of 17-year-old Kian Lloyd delos Santos during a police operation, a doctor took to Facebook to remind everybody that there was another teenage boy who used drugs but managed to turn his life around.
Physician and medical anthropologist Gideon Lasco was talking about boxer-turned-lawmaker Senator Manny Pacquiao.
“Once upon a time, there was a 17-year old drug user living in the poor districts of Manila. “”I tried drugs…many kinds of drugs, all kinds of drugs,” he would later admit,” Lasco wrote.
He further wrote about how “poor but hardworking” Pacquiao had “big” dreams for his family.
“He was given a second chance,” Lasco added.
As of writing, Lasco’s post has been shared over 1,700 times.
Pacquiao did confess to sampling various kinds of drugs and his drug use lasted for years, noted Reuters, before he became a boxing champion.
Times of India also reported that he was really young when he started using, close to Lasco’s estimate of Pacquiao’s age when he used drugs.
“I’m not hiding the fact that I sampled those, but I was young, maybe 15 or 16 years old,” Pacquiao was quoted saying in the article in 2016.
When one commenter criticized Lasco for being “all talk” in voicing his opinions and starting a propaganda against Duterte’s war on drugs, Lasco shot back with a link to a non-government organization, NoBox Philippines, that he is a part of that is helping drug addicts.
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