“Adik” – Not So Meaningless

Posted on By Tony Ramos No Comments on “Adik” – Not So Meaningless

A fellow furparent across the street yelled “Animal abuse!” when I called my dog.

My front gate’s latch failed, before I knew it my three-year-old everything-breed had bolted and crossed the street to my neighbor’s sari-sari store. “Dingaling!” I shouted. “Animal abuse!” my neighbor shot back, laughing. She petted my hairy Houdini’s narrow noggin, then handed her a treat to console her for getting caught so soon. I thanked my neighbor and carried my four-legged baby home, and she loved every second of it.

Giving a dog a name that means silly on her good days and stupid on her bad ones might look mean to others. But she’s my dog, and she has a long rap sheet.

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT SOCIAL COMMENTARY!
Subscribe to our Substack community GRP Insider to receive by email our in-depth free weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to our Substack newsletter, GRP Insider!
Learn more

What’s in a name anyway? What does a label do to the one who has to wear it? I was turning that over because of a Daily Tribune column by Nick V. Quijano Jr. titled “Meaningless.” What got me to click was how it was presented on Facebook. The caption over a photo began with one word: “ADIK!”

Mr. Quijano’s subject was the catchphrases of our political brawls. His argument, as I understood it, is that the putdowns one camp’s keyboard warriors hurl at the other’s have been thrown so often that they no longer wound anybody’s political deity. On the way there he said something about “adik” that I wish more columnists would say. The word, he wrote, is “a disturbing shortcut for quickly classifying a fellow human being as less than human,” and from there it is a short walk to the conclusion that nothing is wrong with killing one.

He named no names. I will add one, because it is on the record. On September 30, 2016, in Davao City, President Rodrigo Duterte said of the country’s drug addicts and pushers, “I’d be happy to slaughter them.” By May 31, 2022, his own drug enforcement agency had counted 6,252 drug suspects killed in the campaign, and human rights groups put the number far higher. Whether those deaths were crimes is for the courts to say. The International Criminal Court confirmed three counts of crimes against humanity against him on April 23, 2026.

All of that matched what I wrote here in September. Then Mr. Quijano and I part ways at one sentence. “Nonetheless, adik is still a favored catchphrase, especially in careless emotion-laden social media comments,” he wrote. “In any political Facebook post, for instance, trolls and automated bots freely comment it too, even if it’s otherwise empty of effect or clout.”

Between two camps of keyboard warriors, I agree that the word “adik” hardly fazes comment section combatants. There the word is a spent cartridge. But empty of effect?

Outside the screens some of us see the world through and the context in which Quijano writes, it has an effect — which is somewhat of a discovery for me.

An old news writer’s itch sent me to read the law, and I found that I had been wrong about this word for decades. I had always treated “adik” as street talk, an insult and nothing more. I doubt I am alone. I imagine the only people familiar with these provisions are those facing charges, their families, and their lawyers.

Here is Section 15 of Republic Act 9165, the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002: “A person apprehended or arrested, who is found to be positive for use of any dangerous drug, after a confirmatory test, shall be imposed a penalty of a minimum of six (6) months rehabilitation in a government center for the first offense.”

Read it twice. Treatment is the penalty.

The section also never asks whether the person is addicted. One positive test is enough, so the statute does what the street does and treats every user as an addict. Get caught a second time and the same section sends you to prison for six years and one day to twelve years. Under Section 25, if you test positive after committing some other crime, the drug use is a “qualifying aggravating circumstance,” which makes the punishment for that crime heavier.

I had also assumed that a person sent to rehab by a court walks out with no record. There is one. The law seals it, but a sealed record is still a record, and the label on it stays on the man. He was arrested, tested, brought before a judge, and told that his treatment is a penalty. To me that reads as a condemnation, whatever the law intends.

And yet the same law, in its opening section, speaks of people “who have fallen victims to drug abuse or dangerous drug dependence.”

The law is very tough on drugs, perhaps even so harsh it doesn’t appear to consider addiction as a mental health condition.

Sixteen years after Republic Act 9165 was enacted into law, Congress came up with another definition for addiction. The Mental Health Act of 2018, Republic Act 11036, says addiction is “a primary chronic relapsing disease of brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry.”

So the Republic gives two answers to the question of what an adik is. He is a patient, and he is an offender. The word carries both verdicts at once, which is a great deal of freight for a word said to be empty.

Then there is the matter of who ends up carrying it. In October 2025, doctors from the Southern Philippines Medical Center reported on a study of more than a hundred patients in two government rehabilitation centers in Davao City. One in four had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Those patients were more likely to abuse several substances and more likely to be readmitted, and the doctors recommended screening for ADHD at admission.

The Mental Health Act already points in that direction. Its Section 43 says that people who submit voluntarily for rehabilitation and people charged under the drug law “shall undergo an examination for mental health conditions.” The Department of Health’s implementing rules repeat that duty and say no more about it.

Neither the law nor the rules say how the examination is carried out, or whether it looks for ADHD at all. I cannot assume it is being done, or how well, and that deserves some checking on my part.

So here are two questions for the Department of Health and the Dangerous Drugs Board. Is the examination that Section 43 requires being done for everyone the law names? And does it screen for ADHD and similar conditions? (I’ll get to asking these questions, as soon as time and resources permit me.)

Put those pieces together. Most people in those wards do not have ADHD, and having it does not make anyone an addict. But if the Davao figure holds elsewhere, one of every four people the drug law sends to rehabilitation has a condition nobody tested him for. He is punished for what he took while the reason he took it goes untreated.

The Davao doctors say rehabilitation treats the addiction and overlooks the ADHD, and their patients with both were more likely to be readmitted.

Had the undiagnosed ADHDer with addiction walked in on his own, the law would still say that after a second failed commitment he is to be “prosecuted like any other offender.”

The law that shields persons with disability from ridicule asks for no ID card before it protects, but he would still have to show that he has a disability, and nobody looked for his. Without a diagnosis, he is left open to the word with little to lean on.

Follow that road to its end. A 2015 review of 42 studies in 15 countries found ADHD in about one of every four prisoners, whatever they were in for, roughly ten times the rate among adults outside. None of those studies was done here, and nobody has counted in our jails. But the Philippines held 171,247 people behind bars as of June 2024. If the same rate applied, that would be more than 40,000 Filipinos locked up with a condition the state never checked for. That is my arithmetic and not a finding. Arithmetic is all anyone has, because nobody has counted.

Blackstone wrote that it is better for ten guilty persons to escape than for one innocent to suffer. He was thinking of the man who did nothing. I wonder what he would say of a state that jails a man without ever asking what was going on in his head.

Our own Revised Penal Code asks that question on paper. Its Article 13, titled “Mitigating circumstances,” lists among the things that can lower a penalty for a crime under the Code “such illness of the offender as would diminish the exercise of the will-power of the offender without however depriving him of the consciousness of his acts.” Whether ADHD would count is for a court to say. No court gets to say it about a condition nobody looked for.

I ask with a stake in the answer. I was screened for ADHD and scored just above the threshold. The practitioner could not issue a diagnosis and referred me to a psychiatrist, and the full workup cost more than I could pay, so I am not formally diagnosed.

I can imagine a man wired the way I am, caught positive once, being told who he is by an arresting officer, then a prosecutor, then a judge: ADIK. .

I think he would believe them. I know what the opposite can do. At my lowest, a friend heard me call myself evil and told me I was not, and that had been enough of a footing to keep myself from drowning.

The better way starts small. The two agencies can answer those questions in public, and if the answer to either is no, the fix is already written into a law they are bound to carry out. The rest of us, columnists first, can stop reaching for the word as an insult, because the people it describes are, by act of Congress, sick.

Nor should we forget how the drug war worked on the ground. People called adik or pusher were put on watch lists, and the Commission on Human Rights warned that barangay officials ordered to hand in names or face sanctions might hand them in carelessly. Those who were only arrested were the lucky ones.

Police say thousands of others were killed because they fought back, “nanlaban.” In the case of Kian delos Santos, a seventeen-year-old student, a Caloocan court heard that story, rejected it, and convicted three policemen of murder. Some were hit by bullets meant for someone else. Danica Mae Garcia was five when a gunman came for her grandfather, who had been told his name was on a watch list.

So adik is not an empty word. It stigmatizes what the law itself calls a disease, it brands a person a criminal on one positive test that does not prove addiction, and it was the label on thousands of the dead. Not empty at all, no sir.

I am pleading for changes that would keep the word “criminal” from being branded on people with ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions, all of them strangers to me. That kindness and grace should find its way into my own home too. So I am considering expunging Dingaling’s record of not-so-good dog behavior and restoring her standing as a good dog.

Perhaps even the bestest one ever, in my book.

Sources

 

Tony Ramos
Latest posts by Tony Ramos (see all)
Crime, Government Tags:, ,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Discover more from Get Real Post

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading