The subject of illegal drugs is a most sensitive one because it has many facets, many tentacles. It is about mental health, family, behavior, friends, neighborhood, poverty, crime, business, and corruption. Most of all, in terms of controversy, it is about killings, whether justified or not, and whether it is the police, vigilantes, or drug syndicates doing it.
I wanted to focus on the surrenderers, especially their great numbers, because they give us glimpses of just how infected our society has become. As in physical health, the coverage and viciousness of a disease are primary factors that determine the gravity of the illness and the kind of treatment necessary to cure it. Unfortunately, some cannot, or refuse, to understand a problem for what it simply is because of a deep prejudice, because of political partisanship, or a hidden agenda drives the person’s thinking and action.
Thankfully, though, if we are to give credence to the latest SWS survey, and the ones in July by both SWS and Pulse Asia, then the vast majority of Filipinos have an intuitive understanding of the state of drugs in the country and really want Duterte to get rid of the problem. Nowhere does President Duterte score so high as in people’s approval of his war on drugs.
This puzzled me early on, why Filipinos would tolerate drug-related killings despite a natural cultural aversion to violence. It seemed to me a great contradiction, known as we are for our hospitable and caring nature. But since Rodrigo Duterte was a candidate who entered the presidential race late in the game without a national organization yet drew enough attention and active response, I tried to understand where all this was coming from.
So I went to the ground, went to communities to ask about drugs, because Mayor Duterte’s public reputation at that time was about drugs and death squads. I wanted to know why he attracted enough people to become a viable presidential candidate.
There are a few simple principles in life. One is that people are most influenced by what is most relevant to them. What is relevant to one may not be as relevant to another. If we are to understand what makes the world go round, especially when that world does not go round the way we want it, we have a choice of whether we will keep on objecting about it until our faces turn blue and our stomachs turn acidic, or understand why things are happening the way they are and then try to change them more toward our liking.
It was clear, even before the shocking numbers of surrenderers reached hundreds of thousands, that the drug menace had reached dangerous levels. My conclusion was based on direct information from barangays that had been surveyed by an organization I belong to, 10,000 barangays as of end of 2015. We were not researching about drugs but the problem of drugs kept being reported. We were after the five top concerns of the barangays we visited, expecting to hear their challenges with income, livelihood, health, education, and calamities—which we did, by the way. But among the top was their concern for peace and order and illegal drugs, for more than 90 percent of the barangays.
And, by the way, drug addiction in the Philippines has long not been just a health problem. It has elevated itself into a public safety threat, a direct one through the violence it spawns, and a more insidious one through the corruption of public servants, from the barangay to the highest levels of government, to all law enforcement agencies. It is less of a physical health issue than it is cancer to the body politic of the nation.
The worst part, though, is that drug addiction at its massive scale means the collapse of the community itself. A community is one that goes by common ways, obligations, rules, and a sense of togetherness especially in difficult times. The 700,000 drug dependents who have surrendered are Duterte’s inheritance from past governments and communities that allowed the penetration of drugs and the addiction of their own neighborhoods without visible resistance. Beyond those who surrendered are maybe many times more than just 700,000, representing an epidemic or pandemic like the plagues of yore.
Any drug rehabilitation effort cannot be just contained inside traditional facilities because it is not anymore just a health problem of individuals. In ongoing assessments of the state of drug dependency among surrenderers, it is already coming out that those who need to be institutionalized are much less than those who are only moderately or mildly affected. But what is obvious is that communities have lost their natural defense systems, their natural strengths to ward off threats like drug addiction and the drug trade.
We hear a lot about “community-based” rehab today, basically because there is no other way to address the volume of surrenderers. But unless the community is actively involved in the rehabilitation of drug dependents, that community will remain the same environment that tolerated the proliferation of drugs that victimized its members. More than being community-based, it should be community-driven for rehab to be sustainable.
It is, after all, the community that is already afflicted, not just some of its members. The drug trade flourishes in any community it targets—unless that community retains its sense of togetherness, its spirit of damayan and bayanihan. Communities, therefore, must rediscover their capacity to know what goes on in their neighborhood, their capacity to protect themselves against threats like illegal drugs, and to promote the common good of their choice.
Communities must take back governance at their level and contribute their share in helping themselves. If they do not, no one can.