The war on drugs was the heart and soul of the preceding Duterte presidency. The illegal drug trade that threatens an entire generation, which made millions of families dysfunctional; corrupted government officials, even police generals of the Philippine National Police; and which infected thousands of barangays, is a cancer that needed to be excised. Among the several candidates for President in the 2016 elections, only one man had the guts, the obsession, and the political will to destroy the evil that placed the Filipino nation on the precipice of disaster.
The electorate overwhelmingly elected that candidate, Rodrigo Roa Duterte, to the highest post in the land. Having known the deleterious effects of addiction to it and the distribution of the prohibited drugs when he was Mayor of Davao City, and which proliferation he was able to eradicate, former President Duterte used the power and resources of his office to dismantle the drug cartels, arrest the drug lords and pushers, with those who resisted violently and who put in peril the lives of law enforcers finding themselves rushing to their graves.
Millions of drug users surrendered with most of them voluntarily subjecting themselves to rehabilitation. The pushers caught in the act of selling and distributing the prohibited drugs were prosecuted and clamped to jail. In a closed-door meeting of local officials he summoned to the Palace, the tough-talking Chief Executive reputed to be the mortal nemesis of criminals, warned them that anybody who was involved in the illegal drug trade would be targeted by the law enforcement forces and will be pursued vigorously, and will either end up dead if they resist violently and put arresting officers in imminent death, or would be booted out of the office and spend their remaining years in prison.
As a consequence of the relentless and vigorous campaign against those who defied the anti-drug laws at the inception of the Duterte presidency up to the last days of FPRRD in office, the streets have been cleaned of drug mobsters, robbers, sexual offenders, and petty criminals, and other nefarious traders of illegal drugs. Citizens, who before the ascendancy of FPRRD in Malacañang, walked the streets in constant fear of being mugged or held up, can traverse the road unharmed.
Eighty-five percent of the barangays have been declared drug-free. Drug factories have been demolished, including the one inside the national penitentiary, which had long been notorious for manufacturing shabu. Drug lords have either been killed in shootouts with police and drug enforcers or have gone into hiding in neighboring countries. Police operations netted 5,000 plus dead. More than a thousand face prosecutions while hundreds are behind bars, with the rest lodged in rehabilitation centers. While a few of the drug syndicates managed to put in a huge number of kilograms of shabu in the country, they were, however, stopped in their tracks and destroyed.
Human rights groups have slammed the Duterte administration for the so-called drug-related extra-judicial killings, and the Duterte critics have been so far successful in convincing the International Criminal Court to try to put the former President under its jurisdiction and account for alleged murders committed against suspected drug users, pushers, and bosses.
Despite the false narratives and outright lies against FPRRD and the drug war, what is evident and unquestionable is the fact that the majority of Filipinos recognize the success of the war on drugs, and the citizens have been spared from becoming victims of this menace.
Six months after the departure of the former President, there appears an incipient resurgence of the drug menace. Reports of drug-related crimes from various parts of the country have started to come in. In other areas, people have started to feel unsafe. The official position of bloodless illegal drug operations and the Department of the Interior and Local Government, have struck fear in the hearts of the citizenry. Rightly or wrongly, the perception is that the current dispensation has altered the course of the vigorous campaign against drug law offenders emboldening them to return to their unlawful acts with impunity.
Those enforcing the law on drugs as well as in crimes must be cautioned. It cannot change radically the methodology of fighting those who endanger the safety, tranquility, and stability of the country.
They must continue what FPRRD has initiated and pursued with unrelenting vigor. As Vice-President and concurrent Secretary of Education, Inday Sara Duterte remarked: "There should be no mercy to criminals!"
There should be no let-up in the anti-drug operations. There is no such animal as bloodless war. They should not throw to waste the gains achieved by the previous administration. The drug war must continue, ex proprio vigore (with full force and effect)!
