The war vs drugs: It is not a colossal failure

Finally after a long wait Vice President Leni Robredo told the media that the President’s war against drugs was a “colossal blunder.” Then she added to inform Pres. Duterte on how to deal with the war on drugs following her short stint as co-chairperson of the Inter-agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD). In the first place, she only had a very short time as co-chairperson of ICAD and the least I would have expected her to say was that the war against drugs was a failure. But she had to add that this was a colossal failure, which made us look into the three and a half years on how the war vs. drugs has been fought.

The problem with the Vice President is that she issued a totally unfair statement against the war on drugs. In the first place if only she looked at the number of drug lords that roamed around their respective turfs, there were a lot of them who had complete protection from the Philippine National Police (PNP). This was in the six-year term of then President PNoy Aquino. In Region VII, we had Police General Marcelo Garbo who was tagged as a narco general. So we ask… where is Gen. Garbo now? I’m sure he is enjoying his “retirement” money when he should be facing a jail sentence!

Mind you the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) said that it has prepared a solid complaint against former Police Deputy Director General Marcelo Garbo for allegedly amassing ill-gotten wealth amounting to P35.36 million. The NBI added that it has filed complaints of forfeiture, falsification of public documents, graft, and violation of Republic Act 6713 or the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees against Garbo before the Office of the Ombudsman.

Garbo is among the retired and incumbent police generals who President Rodrigo Duterte accused of involvement in the illegal drugs trade along with his pals, Police Director Joel Pagdilao, Chief Supt. Edgardo Tinio, Bernardo Diaz, and Daanbantayan Mayor Vicente Loot all of whom denied these accusations. That these police drug protectors are no longer operating the way they did during PNoy’s time should be considered a success. But Vice President Leni Robredo did not count these as successes… rather calls it a colossal failure…which makes her statement totally biased and political in nature.

Right now in many places in Region VII especially Cebu City known drug lords have slowly disappeared and no doubt have left the country hoping that after the term of Pres. Duterte ends, they can return home. Mind you, we’re not saying that the war against drugs has already been won. We know for a fact that the vacuum created by the disappearance of these big shot war lords has been taken over by lesser-known characters that the PNP has to identify.  You want to talk about the Parojinogs? While they are physically gone, small time drug handlers that used to work for the Parojinogs have taken over what little they can handle. So it’s up to the police to look for them.

Perhaps VP Robredo does not realize that many surveys especially done by the Social Weather Station that measured the satisfaction of the public from December 2017 to September 2019. These are very high satisfaction surveys about the war on drugs that debunk the “colossal failure” that VP Robredo is insinuating. If only she read those surveys she might have realized that calling the war against drugs, as a “colossal failure” is totally wrong!

I especially like what Sen. Christopher Go mentioned… that “The Filipino people should be the one to judge whether President Duterte’s war on drugs is a failure or not. It’s the ordinary citizens who are benefitting (from the anti-drug campaign) because they’re the ones who say they feel safer compared to the time of the previous administration.” This statement is very true and if the war against drugs has become a very difficult fight, it is only because the “friends” supporting VP Robredo allowed the drug menace to turn the country into a Narco State. 

Sen. Go added, “Between one person using her own computation giving a grade of one percent, and 79 percent of Filipinos who said they are satisfied with the anti-drug campaign, I will choose to believe the latter.” By this he meant the results of Social Weather Stations survey last December.

At this point, I would like to believe that the war against drugs would never be over for simply, because there’s a lot of easy money to be made in dealing with illegal drugs. The DDB stressed the importance of having a unified data and scientific basis in the implementation of the government’s policies and programs. We gathered that the agency is conducting the data gathering together with the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) to determine the extent of drug use in the country. President Duterte previously said there were about seven to eight million drug users in the country, way above the 1.8 million in a survey of the DDB in 2015. While the war has not been won, it was never a failure as what the VP told us.

*  *  *

Email: [email protected]