The suggestion to decriminalize the use of illegal drugs in the country was “unwise if not cerebrally challenged,” Malacañang said on Thursday.
In a statement, Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo shot down the advice of former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark to decriminalize the use of drugs as an alternative to the drug war.
Clark, former administrator of the United Nations Development Program, said the Philippines should tackle a human rights-based strategy in dealing with illegal drugs.
“Whenever you criminalize a behavior of human beings, you drive that behavior underground and that can have very serious health consequences. I am very much for an approach based on the decriminalization and the legal regularization of available drugs,” Clark said.
“I hope the Philippines will look for an approach to drugs which is firmly based on human rights, the right to life and the right to health.”
But Panelo rejected her suggestion, saying it was “similar to the proposal by the European Union made two years ago that had already been turned down by President Rodrigo Duterte.
“Decriminalizing the use of drugs in the Philippines will not only aggravate but multiply the problem,” Panelo said.
He said the Philippines was a country where the proliferation of illegal drug had become “a billion-peso industry.”
“Take out the criminal liability of those involved and you induce and encourage others to be a part of the dreaded evil,・ he said, adding 97 percent of the villages had already been infiltrated.
“We suggest observers, especially those in foreign countries, to understand fully the Philippine government’s strategy in dealing with illegal drugs before being persuaded by one-sided information and crafting unwise, if not cerebrally challenged, commentaries based thereon,” Panelo said.
He justified the Duterte administration’s controversial crackdown on drugs, stressing it remained “anchored on national security and on public health.
“Drug treatment and rehabilitation form part of the second phase of our campaign,” he said.
He said it was during the Duterte administration that a 10,000-bed drug rehabilitation center, the country’s biggest, opened in Nueva Ecija.
As of February 2017, Panelo said, 27 reformation centers had also been established.
He bragged about the results of the Social Weather Stations survey showing that seven out of 10 Filipinos were “satisfied” about how the government was handling its drug campaign.
Malacañang has previously said 164,265 drug suspects had been arrested, 9,503 villages cleared of drugs, and P25.19 billion worth of drugs and equipment had been seized from the start of Duterte’s term in 2016 until November 2018. The figures were “real numbers and unalterable facts.”