“The war on drugs will continue but we have to do it in a different way.”
That was the answer of then presidential candidate Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. when asked during the campaign for the May 9 general elections what he intended to do with the bloody war on drugs unleashed by Rodrigo Duterte from July 2016 to end-June 2022.
Today, the war on drugs under President Marcos certainly appears to have taken a different turn, taking the form of both the preventive and rehabilitative aspects, with focus on preventing the use of banned substances and on rehabilitating drug addicts.
But there’s another aspect of the marching order given to the police: Get the big fish, not the street-level or small-time drug dealers.
Duterte had ordered law enforcers to “destroy” the apparatus of drug traders and to shoot drug offenders if they felt that their lives were endangered.
The inevitable result? More than 6,200 drug suspects were officially acknowledged by the government as having been killed in anti-drug operations because they allegedly fought back (‘nanlaban’).
Human rights groups, however, claim that between 20,000 and 30,000 alleged drug suspects were killed in what they say were brazen summary executions. This number has not been confirmed or validated by an independent entity.
What has clearly changed in the war on drugs under the current administration is the number of casualties.
The Philippine National Police reported recently that close to 50 suspects have been killed in anti-drug operations five months under the Marcos Jr. administration.
PNP Chief, Gen. Rodolfo Azurin, said 32 drug suspects have died in PNP operations while 14 others were killed by agents of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency.
The number of deaths acknowledged by the PNP, however, is much lower than that monitored by Dahas PH, a running count of reported drug-related killings by the Third World Studies Center at the University of the Philippines, which documented 127 drug suspects killed between July 1 and November 7.
The PNP is actually implementing these days a new anti-narcotics program called “ADORE”—short for Anti-Illegal Drugs Operation through Reinforcement & Education, which it says is a “multi-faceted reinforcement and education-based strategy” to combat the drug menace.
What is new is that the PNP explicitly does not want to resort to killings as much as possible according to Gen. Azurin: “My policy that I emphasized to every police officer is that we will minimize the use of force in arresting drug suspects.”
In very specific situations where the lives of police personnel are placed in danger, however, then they will have no recourse but to defend themselves.