E. Rodriguez Jr.

High School

Mayon Ave., Brgy. N.S. Amoranto, Quezon City

Philippine Politics and Governance :

A Narrative Report on Philippines' Bloody Drug

War in President Rodrigo Duterte's Regime

Presented by: John Cedrick E. De Leon

G12 - Aristotle

Presented to: Reynante M. Palacio

How does the drug war started?

When Rodrigo Duterte campaigned for president, he claimed that drug dealing and drug
addiction were major obstacles to the Philippines’ economic and social progress. He promised a
large-scale crackdown on dealers and addicts, similar to the crackdown that he engaged in when
he was mayor of Davao, one of the Philippines’ largest cities on the southern island of
Mindanao. When Duterte became president in June, he encouraged the public to “go ahead and
kill” drug addicts. His rhetoric has been widely understood as an endorsement of extrajudicial
killings, as it has created conditions for people to feel that it’s appropriate to kill drug users and
dealers. What have followed seem to be vigilante attacks against alleged or suspected drug
dealers and drug addicts. The police are engaged in large-scale sweeps. The Philippine National
Police also revealed a list of high-level political officials and other influential people who were
allegedly involved in the drug trade.

The dominant drug in the Philippines is a variant of methamphetamine called shabu. According
to a 2012 United Nations report, among all the countries in East Asia, the Philippines had the
highest rate of methamphetamine abuse. Estimates showed that about 2.2 percent of Filipinos
between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four were using methamphetamines, and that
methamphetamines and marijuana were the primary drugs of choice. In 2015, the national drug
enforcement agency reported that one fifth of the barangays, the smallest administrative division
in the Philippines, had evidence of drug use, drug trafficking, or drug manufacturing; in Manila,
the capital, 92 percent of the barangays had yielded such evidence.

By early December, nearly 6,000 people had been killed: about 2,100 have died in police
operations and the remainder in what are called “deaths under investigation,” which is shorthand
for vigilante killings. There are also claims that half a million to seven hundred thousand people
have surrendered themselves to the police. More than 40,000 people have been arrested.

Although human rights organizations and political leaders have spoken out against the
crackdown, Duterte has been relatively successful at not having the legislature engaged in any
serious oversight of or investigation into this war. Philippine Senator Leila de Lima, former
chairperson of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights and a former secretary of justice
under the previous administration, had condemned the war on drugs and held hearings on human
rights violations associated with these extrajudicial killings. However, in August, Duterte alleged
that he had evidence of de Lima having an affair with her driver, who had been using drugs and
collecting drug protection money when de Lima was the justice secretary. De Lima was later
removed from her position chairing the investigative committee in a 16-4 vote by elected
members of the Senate committee.
The Philippine judicial system is very slow and perceived as corrupt, enabling Duterte to act
proactively and address the issue of drugs in a non-constructive way with widespread violations
of human rights. Moreover, in the face of a corrupt, elite-dominated political system and a slow,
ineffective, and equally corrupt judicial system, people are willing to tolerate this politician who
promised something and is now delivering.

There are no trials, so there is no evidence that the people being killed are in fact drug dealers or
drug addicts. [This situation] shows the weakness of human rights institutions and discourse in
the face of a popular and skilled populist leader. It is different from college students being
arrested under the Marcos regime or activists being targeted under the first Aquino
administration, when popular outcry was aroused. Drug dealers and drug addicts are a
stigmatized group, and stigmatized groups always have difficulty gaining political support for
the defense of their rights.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines is morally and legally unjustifiable.
Resulting in egregious and large-scale violations of human rights, it amounts to state-sanctioned
murder. It is also counterproductive for countering the threats and harms that the illegal drug
trade and use pose to society — exacerbating both problems while profoundly shredding the
social fabric and rule of law in the Philippines.

How President Duterte handle his critics?

Duterte continued his murderous “war on drugs” in the face of mounting international criticism
and he even sought to silence his critics via various means. His most prominent critic, Senator
Leila de Lima, remained in detention on politically motivated drug charges. In May, the
Philippine Supreme Court took unprecedented action to remove Chief Justice Maria Lourdes
Sereno, apparent reprisal for her criticism of Duterte’s “drug war” and other abusive policies. In
September, Duterte revoked the amnesty given to Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, another Duterte
critic, by the previous administration for leading mutinies in 2003 and 2007 when he was a naval
officer; in October, a Manila court denied a Department of Justice petition to issue a warrant for
his arrest.

The Duterte administration ratcheted up its attack on media freedom in January 2018 by
threatening the closure of Rappler.com, an online news outlet critical of the “war on drugs.” In
November, the Department of Justice indicted Rappler and its editor and founder, Maria Ressa,
for tax evasion. This followed months of attacks and harassment of Rappler by the Duterte
government and its supporters.

New draft regulations by the Philippine House of Representatives in May would allow Congress
to ban reporters who “besmirch” the reputation of lawmakers from covering the national
legislature. Journalists and some members of Congress have denounced the proposed rule as
dangerously ambiguous and stifling.

The killings of journalists continued in 2018, with six murdered by unidentified gunmen in
different parts of the country.

What counternarcotics policies the Philippines should adopt?

The Philippines should adopt radically different approaches: The shoot-to-kill directives to
police and calls for extrajudicial killings should stop immediately, as should dragnets against
low-level pushers and users. If such orders are issued, prosecutions of any new extrajudicial
killings and investigations of encounter killings must follow. In the short term, the existence of
pervasive culpability may prevent the adoption of any policy that would seek to investigate and
prosecute police and government officials and members of neighborhood councils who have
been involved in the state-sanctioned slaughter. If political leadership in the Philippines changes,
however, standing up a truth commission will be paramount. In the meantime, however, all
existing arrested drug suspects need to be given fair trials or released.

Law-enforcement and rule of law components of drug policy designs need to make reducing
criminal violence and violent militancy among their highest objectives. The Philippines should
build up real intelligence on the drug trafficking networks that President Duterte alleges exist in
the Philippines and target their middle operational layers, rather than low-level dealers, as well as
their corruption networks in the government and law enforcement. However, the latter must not
be used to cover up eliminating rival politicians and independent political voices.

To deal with addiction, the Philippines should adopt enlightened harm-reduction measures,
including methadone maintenance, safe-needle exchange, and access to effective treatment. No
doubt, these are difficult and elusive for methamphetamines, the drug of choice in the
Philippines. Meth addiction is very difficult to treat and is associated with high morbidity levels.
Instead of turning his country into a lawless Wild East, President Duterte should make the
Philippines the center of collaborative East Asian research on how to develop effective public
health approaches to methamphetamine addiction.

Another crucial goal of drug policy should be to enhance public health and limit the spread of
diseases linked to drug use. The worst possible policy is to push addicts into the shadows,
ostracize them, and increase the chance of overdoses as well as a rapid spread of HIV/AIDS,
drug-resistant tuberculosis, and hepatitis. In prisons, users will not get adequate treatment for
either their addiction or their communicable disease.

The 'war on drugs' is ineffective and it causes more damage in the society

The mass killings and imprisonment in the Philippines will not dry up demand for drugs: the
many people who will end up in overcrowded prisons and poorly-designed treatment centers (as
is already happening) will likely remain addicted to drugs, or become addicts. There is always
drug smuggling into prisons and many prisons are major drug distribution and consumption
spots.

Even when those who surrendered are placed into so-called treatment centers, instead of outright
prisons, large problems remain. Many who surrendered do not necessarily have a drug abuse
problem as they surrendered preemptively to avoid being killed if they for whatever reason
ended up on the watch list. Those who do have a drug addiction problem mostly do not receive
adequate care. Treatment for drug addiction is highly underdeveloped and underprovided in the
Philippines, and China’s rushing in to build larger treatment facilities is unlikely to resolve this
problem. In China itself, many so-called treatment centers often amounted to de facto prisons or
force-labor detention centers, with highly questionable methods of treatment and very high
relapse rates.

As long as there is demand, supply and retailing will persist, simply taking another form. Indeed,
there is a high chance that Duterte’s hunting down of low-level pushers (and those accused of
being pushers) will significantly increase organized crime in the Philippines and intensify
corruption. The dealers and traffickers who will remain on the streets will only be those who can
either violently oppose law enforcement and vigilante groups or bribe their way to the highest
positions of power. By eliminating low-level, mostly non-violent dealers, Duterte is
paradoxically and counterproductively setting up a situation where more organized and powerful
drug traffickers and distribution will emerge.

Inducing police to engage in de facto shoot-to-kill policies is enormously corrosive of law

enforcement, not to mention the rule of law. There is a high chance that the policy will more than
ever institutionalize top-level corruption, as only powerful drug traffickers will be able to bribe
their way into upper-levels of the Philippine law enforcement system, and the government will
stay in business. Moreover, corrupt top-level cops and government officials tasked with such
witch-hunts will have the perfect opportunity to direct law enforcement against their drug
business rivals as well as political enemies, and themselves become the top drug capos.
Unaccountable police officers officially induced to engage in extrajudicial killings easily
succumb to engaging in all kinds of criminality, being uniquely privileged to take over criminal
markets. Those who should protect public safety and the rule of law themselves become
criminals.