EDITORIAL- Shame campaign

This has been tried before, and discarded. Alfredo Lim, dubbed the “Dirty Harry” of the Philippines, spray-painted the houses of drug suspects in Manila in a shame campaign that was declared unconstitutional in 2000 by the Court of Appeals.

Spray-painting homes is better than executing drug suspects, but that doesn’t make such a campaign compliant with the Constitution. This time, with the bloody campaign against illegal drugs slowed down by abuses committed by the police unit principally tasked to wage the war, the administration is considering its version of the shame campaign: posting stickers on houses that are deemed drug-free.

Interior Secretary Mike Sueno, proponent of the scheme, described it as a “nonviolent and encouraging” tack against illegal drugs. It undoubtedly is less violent than Oplan Tokhang. But the scheme has a glaring flaw: it identifies homes without the stickers as drug-affected. As in the spray-painting campaign, the sticker approach stigmatizes everyone in the household including children. In this administration, it also raises the danger of a deadly raid on homes without stickers, either by anti-narcotics agents or vigilantes.

In considering the proposal, the administration should go back to the ruling of the appellate court on Lim’s spray-painting shame campaign, which was authorized through a city ordinance when he was mayor of Manila. “The purpose and intention of the ordinance is highly commendable,” the court ruled. “But good intentions are not enough. The end does not justify the means. We still have to adhere to the rule of law – always, the rule of law.”

Such a campaign, the ruling declared, violates constitutional guarantees on the presumption of innocence and the right to due process, which are enjoyed by all drug suspects. As in Tokhang, the houses that were spray-painted belonged mainly to the poor. And as Tokhang has shown, such campaigns are prone to abuse by those tasked to implement it.

Drug addiction is a family tragedy that is merely aggravated by a shame campaign. There are other ways of fighting the drug menace, focusing on the manufacturers and major distributors of prohibited drugs as well as their coddlers in the police and civilian government.