A predawn buy-bust along Sales Street in Davao City ended with eleven people in custody after agents moved on a bar they suspected of doubling as a drug den, authorities said.
Operatives from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency Regional Office 11 and the National Bureau of Investigation Southeastern Mindanao Regional Office carried out the sting at roughly 2:40 a.m. on July 11 in Barangay 27-C, according to Brigada News.
The transaction that set off the raid involved a disc jockey known only as “DJ Kar,” who allegedly handed suspected ecstasy worth an estimated P14,000 to an undercover agent before being taken into custody. Agents also arrested the person accused of running the operation, identified by the alias “Edward,” along with three others said to be working the venue, going by the names Ryan, Harvey, and Raul.
Inside the establishment, agents reported finding jars of what they believed to be dissolved ecstasy. The Mindanao Times reported that this came in the form of two 500-milliliter bottles of suspected diluted liquid ecstasy, which PDEA pegged as part of a haul carrying a street value of about P255,000. Investigators additionally recovered 65 marijuana vape cartridges, an assortment of drug paraphernalia, and the marked money used in the operation.
Ecstasy, or MDMA, is rarely produced within the Philippines and is typically brought in from abroad, a supply pattern that has surfaced in earlier party-drug cases in the Davao Region.
All eleven remain in government custody and are being processed for alleged violations of Republic Act No. 9165, the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002.
