Resume the drug war – scientifically this time

Ending the shabu scourge remains top priority. A society softened by addiction cannot progress. The previous admin admitted failure of its promised drug war. The new one must avoid past mistakes.

The campaign flopped because driven by dazzle and not data. Planning was haphazard. Malacañang trumpeted to wipe out shabu lords in three months, then six months, then one year. None of the deadlines was met.

Four of five supposed syndicate bosses were slain: two in prison, the third in police custody and the fourth in a raid. The last, close to higher-ups, was spared. Narcs dismantled dozens of shabu laboratories in rented mansions with swimming pools, penthouse condos and huge piggeries. Police barged into shanties or busted pushers in the streets. Thousands were killed following a pattern: “nanlaban (they resisted)”, pulling out rusty 38 caliber revolvers from basketball shorts when cornered.

Crime-riddled streets turned quiet. Over a million confessed addicts surrendered to barangay officials. But there was no rehab plan at all. After half-day lectures under the sun, they were told to go home and sin no more. Left unused was a multi-story halfway house hurriedly built inside a military camp by a Chinese donor who turned out to be in the government’s very drug watchlist.

The demand-side of the narco-trade remained. Yet authorities could not agree on figures. The policy-making Dangerous Drugs Board estimated addicts to number 1.6 million. Its Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and deputized Philippine National Police counted 3.2 million. Wars are lost on miscalculations.

The supply-side went on too. Shabu continued to be smuggled by the tons in ports or dropped shipside in isolated islands. Contraband slipped past Customs inside metal printing cylinders and magnetic lifters, or concealed in cargo containers of tapioca starch and tea bags.

Malacañang and its enforcers could not see their mistakes. Hunger for publicity blinded them. They kept top billing the tens to hundreds of millions of pesos worth of shabu they confiscated in street buy-busts. More so, the billions in cash of bulks they interdicted in warehouses.

But peso values were inaccurate measures of success. Those values fluctuate depending on smuggling arrivals and location of seizure. A freshly delivered kilo-bag (1000 grams) of shabu may fetch P10 million for gangsters in Bicol or the Visayas, where they have fewer provincial sub-dealers and street-pushers to sell to fewer addicts. Yet even only a tenth of that volume in 100 one-gram sachets peddled by a grandmother can command the same P10 million in Metro Manila, where there are more cops on the lookout. Enforcers craved media headlines for nabbing without understanding the fluctuations.

After each such multimillion-peso success, vice squad leaders wrote up self-commendatory reports for promotion. As they rose in rank, they “intensified” the drug war for still higher promotion.

The better success measure should be the volume of shabu versus the number of addicts. Authorities should seize more supply to make it prohibitive for addicts – assuming the latter finish months-long rehab.

Only once did the PDEA summarize its data – in #RealNumbersPH, July 1, 2016-June 30, 2019. Stated among others was that 4,409 kilos of shabu were seized in those three years. Its value of P34.75 billion is irrelevant.

Days after PDEA released the report in November 2019, the PNP-Drug Enforcement Group reiterated what it was up against. Three million addicts each snort one gram of shabu per week. That’s a staggering three million grams or 3,000 kilos a week. The value of that shabu market is P25 billion a week, PNP-DEG said. That’s why criminals persist in narco-trafficking.

Analyzing the PDEA and PNP-DEG data showed a dismal success rate. In the 156 weeks of July 2016-June 2019, the government had seized only one-and-a-half week’s consumption of shabu. That was at the cost of nearly 6,000 drug lords, pushers – and lawmen – killed.

As far back as April 2019, Malacañang surrendered: “The shabu problem was swallowing the country.” Thereafter, raids and buy-busts continued here and there – still highlighting the irrelevant street values instead of the volumes.

If the drug war must resume, it should be scientific this time. (Read also “Report volume, not value of shabu interdictions”, Gotcha, 4 Dec. 2019: https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2019/12/04/1974051/report-volume-not-value-shabu-interdictions

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