The Philippine drug war, known as the War on Drugs, is the intensified anti-drug campaign of the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, who served office from June 30, 2016, to June 30, 2022. The campaign reduced drug proliferation in the country, but has been marred by extrajudicial killings allegedly perpetrated by the police and unknown assailants. An estimated 7,742 civilians have been killed in "anti-drug operations" carried out by the government and its supporters between 2016 and 2021.
Prior to his presidency, Duterte cautioned that the Philippines was at risk of becoming a narco-state and vowed the fight against illegal drugs would be relentless. He has urged the public to kill drug addicts. The anti-narcotics campaign has been condemned by media organizations and human rights groups, which reported staged crime scenes where police allegedly execute unarmed drug suspects, planting guns and drugs as evidence. Philippine authorities have denied misconduct by police.
Duterte has since admitted to underestimating the illegal drug problem when he promised to rid the country of illegal drugs within six months of his presidency, citing the difficulty in border control against illegal drugs due to the country's long coastline and lamented that government officials and law enforcers themselves were involved in the drug trade.
In 2022, Duterte urged his successor, Bongbong Marcos, who won the 2022 Philippine presidential election, to continue the war on drugs in "his own way" to protect the youth. Marcos declared his intention to continue the anti-narcotics campaign, focusing more on prevention and rehabilitation.
Background
Owing to its geographical location, international drug syndicates use the Philippines as a transit hub for the illegal drug trade. Some local drug syndicates and gangs are also involved in narcotics, utilizing drug mules to transport small amounts of illegal drugs to other countries. In the 90s, the Philippines became a temporary theatre of the U.S.-led War on Drugs; at one point the Drug Enforcement Administration even conducted their own operations in the country. The new millennium saw a boom in the illegal drug industry. In 2010 alone, a U.S. International Narcotics Control Strategy report estimated the illegal drug trade in the Philippines at $6.4 to $8.4 billion annually.
This perceived growth of illegal drugs in the Philippines led to the nomination of Rodrigo Duterte in the 2016 presidential election, owing to his time as mayor in Davao City which was allegedly the 9th "safest city in the world" according to the non-peer-reviewed crowd-sourced rating site Numbeo, which has been criticized for inaccuracy, disinformation and being prone to manipulation. In reality, the highest number of violent incidents in the Philippines occurred in the Davao Region, with Davao City alone making up 45% of the cases in its region.
Duterte would win the 2016 Philippine presidential election promising to kill tens of thousands of criminals, with a platform urging people to kill drug addicts. Duterte has benefited from reports in the national media that he made Davao into one of the world's safest cities, which he cites as justification for his drug policy, although national police data shows that the city has the highest murder rate and the second highest rape rate in the Philippines.
As Mayor of Davao City, Duterte was criticized by such groups as Human Rights Watch for the extrajudicial killings of hundreds of street children, petty criminals and drug users carried out by the Davao Death Squad, a vigilante group with which he was allegedly involved. Duterte has alternately confirmed and denied his involvement in the alleged Davao Death Squad killings. Cases of extrajudicial killings have long since been a problem in the Philippines even before the Duterte administration. In a research report for The Asia Foundation conducted by Atty. Al A. Parreno on the grim tradition of police executions, there were a total of 305 incidents of extrajudicial killings with 390 victims from 2001 to 2010, with only a total of 161 cases or 56% of the incidents have been filed with the prosecutor. Atty. Parreno also concluded that the number of cases could be higher.