Half-empty

During last Tuesday’s Pandesal Forum, Sen. Richard Gordon was asked, as an aside, what he thought of Vice-President Leni Robredo’s report on the war on drugs. The senator was speaking mainly on the Philippine National Red Cross’ preparations for the “traslacion” happening today.

Gordon declined comment, saying that the worse thing that can happen to the vital national effort to combat drug use is to politicize it. That was wise insight.

If politicians wanted to run the war on drugs, they might as well don uniforms. In which case, they should cede to the police the running of government.

Robredo spend a total of 18 days as co-chair of a multi-agency council overseeing the campaign against illegal drugs. She was appointed to that post because she presented herself as capable of offering an alternative approach to the comprehensive effort. She was fired shortly after for incompetence.

If she had any usable insights from that brief (and superficial) exposure to the anti-drug campaign, she might have chosen to write a confidential memo to the President. That is what everybody else does.

But Robredo chose to publish a report and introduce it by way of a press conference. Instead of being helpful, the act smacks of political grandstanding. Politics immediately colors whatever recommendations she might have.

The report patently downplays the gains achieved by an anti-drug effort supported by an overwhelming majority in all public opinion polls for its effect on diminishing the volume of criminality. That is an injustice to the heroic police officers putting their lives on the line during every drug raid and every buy-bust operation.

Any assessment that downplays the courage and determination of our law enforcers in doing a task ignored by previous political leaders is skewed. This perilous campaign required tremendous political will. That should at least have been acknowledged.

Nor does the report take note of the thousands of barangays that have been declared drug-free in the course of this campaign. The barangays are the frontlines for this effort.

Strangely, the report sidesteps the issue of extrajudicial killings. This is the aspect that obsessed critics of this campaign.

Instead, the Robredo report chooses to fetishize over numbers, claiming the anti-drug effort has not been as assiduous as it should be in using “data.”

The centerpiece of the report appears to be a stilted attempt to juxtapose an actual number (the amount of drugs recovered by law enforcement) with an extrapolated number (the estimate of drugs consumed). Since the amount of drugs recovered is only about one percent of the estimated amount of drugs consumed, Robredo declares the drug war an immense failure.

In the social sciences, a cardinal error in methodology occurs if one indulges in “abstracted empiricism.” This error involved taking pieces of data and removing them from all context and all history. 

In the anti-drug campaign, the main objective is to reduce drug use. It is not to collect drugs. Otherwise the PDEA should be renamed the Philippine Drug Collection Agency. Its main accomplishment should be a large warehouse where confiscated drugs are collected.

Illicit drugs, the most prevalent being crystal meth, are moved in small batches, even smaller packages and tiny sachets. The efficiency of the syndicates could be measured in shortening the time between production and final consumption.

The drug lords, unlike the rice cartel, do not maintain warehouses where they hoard illicit substances and await better market prices. That will be a stupid thing to do, making the syndicates vulnerable to raids.

The perilous buy-bust operations often manage to seize illicit substances in grams, not tons. That is the nature of the beast we are trying to defeat.

The only ready measure of surfeit or shortage in the supply of illicit substances is street price. This aspect is not analyzed in the report.

By some feat of pseudo-science, the Robredo report takes the (rough) estimate of drug users, deducts from it the number of users who have surrendered or were killed and arrives at the conclusion that there 2.5 million users are unaccounted for. The number produced by this rather facile exercise then becomes the basis for pronouncing the anti-drug effort a failure.

By indulging in this ridiculous exercise in faulty calculation, what would Robredo recommend law enforcers do? Should they open registration stations for drug users to come in, sign up and be duly recognized? If that is done, will the drug war become a success?

Robredo recommends that the PDEA be abolished and its functions assumed by the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB). This is probably the most naïve component of the report.

The DDB is a policy-making body. It decides over what substances should be regulated and what should be banned outright. The PDEA is a law enforcement unit, undertaking the raids and the buy-bust operations as well as identifying the high-value targets in this campaign.

The two agencies are entirely different species. Even if Robredo spent only 18 days as co-chair, she should have realized this.

In a word, it appears Robredo decided on her conclusions (on entirely political inspiration) and then framed a “report” that would support them. Although professing to be concerned about “data,” this is not a scientific approach.

The effort to diminish drug abuse will be a long and arduous effort. Any time, along the way, any mediocre politician can easily come up and say the glass is half-empty instead of half-full.

Doing so does not require much talent – although it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.