Father Flavie Villanueva wants us to do the math — simple arithmetic presented as moral philosophy.

Three sachets of shabu, P50 profit each — P150 for a child’s school allowance.

“So hindi talaga usaping pang-drug addict. Usaping pantawid sa kahirapan (So it’s not really about being a drug addict. It’s about surviving poverty),” he says.

A priest who admitted to having once walked through the hell of drug addiction himself is asking us to see the humanity in the desperate.

A request that could be hard to refuse, but the problem is his math is missing some very crucial numbers. When a man of his supposed moral authority presents an incomplete equation, the error ripples far beyond the pulpit. It distorts the public discourse and gives comfort to dangerous ideas.

It deserves correction, with the same urgency he brings to his questionable anti-drug war advocacy.

Let us complete the calculation that he started.

That P150 does not come from nowhere. It is paid by someone. Perhaps they are a construction worker who started using shabu to get through 16-hour shifts. Maybe they are a mother escaping the reality of an empty fridge. Perhaps they are a teenager whose curiosity was exploited by the very same logic of “tawid sa kahirapan” that Father Flavie now invokes.

When they buy that sachet, it’s the beginning of a transaction, not the end. That P150 becomes a cycle of dependency. It becomes missed work, stolen goods, neglected kids, broken homes. It becomes an overdose, and worse, death. And in communities like the ones Father Flavie serves, it becomes a wound that never fully heals.

So, when he asks us to sympathize with the seller, he is asking us to ignore the buyer. He is asking us to end the story at the moment of sale, as if what comes after is someone else’s problem. Instead of compassion, it’s a selective empathy that is just prejudice dressed in a sotana.

Father Flavie’s argument also stumbles over a basic logical hurdle: if poverty alone were the cause of drug peddling, then every poor person would sell drugs. Yet millions of Filipinos wake up in gut-wrenching poverty and do not reach for a sachet to sell. They scavenge. They beg. They take jobs that overwork their bodies. They do not destroy their neighbors.

Why? Because they understand something that Father Flavie’s narrative obscures: that selling poison to your own community is not survival but betrayal. It is choosing your child over someone else’s child. It is deciding that your hunger matters more than the hunger of the family whose father will spend his wages on shabu instead of rice.

Father Flavie knows what it is to choose. He chose recovery. He chose the priesthood. Those choices were hard, likely made harder by his own history. But he made them. And if he could, then we must believe others can too. To suggest otherwise diminishes his own journey.

The drug trade is actually a trap contrary to the misplaced narrative that it’s a ladder out of poverty. It is a trap. The P150 that feeds one child today will be gone tomorrow, and the seller will need to sell again. And again. And again. Until they are arrested, killed, or replaced by someone even more desperate. It is not a solution. It is a sentence.

To those who say that it was a well-meant statement, it is not enough when the stakes are this high. His logic, if followed to its conclusion, leads us to a place where every crime can be excused by circumstance. Where the drug lord can claim he is just providing jobs. Where the corrupt official can say he is just feeding his family. Where morality becomes a sliding scale, and justice becomes a luxury.

We can fight poverty without romanticizing the destruction of communities. We can demand systemic change without absolving individual choices. And we can honor Father Flavie’s redemption without accepting the flawed logic that would excuse the very system that once enslaved him.

The math of the sachet of shabu is simple, however, the truth isn’t. Until we are willing to do the hard work of holding both poverty and personal responsibility in the same thought, we will continue to lose this fight against illegal drugs.