Fentanyl has driven Duterte to madness —De Lima

Fentanyl has driven President Rodrigo Duterte to madness, Sen. Leila de Lima said Wednesday.

"Duterte should stop taking Fentanyl because obviously it has already driven him to madness and to fits of paranoia where everyone he sees is either a drug addict or a drug lord," De Lima said in a statement.

De Lima was reacting to Duterte's statement about the award she accepted as one of the 100 Foreign Policy Global Thinkers in Washington.

Duterte said that the senator "glorified" with an award in Washington was on his drug list, which also included former Iligan City representative Vicente Belmonte and former city mayor Lawrence Cruz.

Both former Iligan City officials are claiming that a local official might have had a hand in manipulating the list. They are asking for a meeting with Duterte and said they were ready to face any investigation.

De Lima said she is confident that that "new" Duterte's drug list "is again laden with errors" or "did not undergo a thorough process of verification."

"At least I, whom he recklessly and wrongly accuses as a narco-politician, haven't taken a single addictive drug in my life, while he who runs amok and froths in the mouth like a rabid animal has the temerity to make up a list, when he should be on the top of that list," De Lima said.

She added: "Mr. President, stop abusing drugs so for even one single second you can experience a lucid interval and discover how crazy this drug war witch-hunting has become."

In a News To Go interview on Wednesday morning, Health Assistant Secretary Eric Tayag said that they are confident that Duterte is taking precautions in taking the pain killer medicine fentanyl.

"We are confident that the President knows its indications and contraindications and the dose he has to take and the precautions he has to make," Tayag said when asked to comment on Duterte's admission that he is taking fentanyl.

He agreed that some patients tend to abuse fentanyl.

Fentanyl is used to treat patients with chronic pain or manage pain after surgery.

In a speech last December 12, Duterte admitted that there was a time that he doubled his prescribed medication for fentanyl because it made him feel better.

He said his doctor had warned him that he may be already abusing the drug.

"When he knew it, he made me stop and he said, 'Stop it. The first thing that you would lose is your cognitive ability.' 'And if you are noticing it', he said, 'Because you are, you know, abusing the drug,'" Duterte said. —ALG, GMA News