IN A SERIES recently, PCIJ conducted separate, extended interviews with senior officials of Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), the Philippine National Police (PNP), and the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB).
Our goal: Get their side on specific questions about the numbers, conduct, impact, and confusing concepts and narratives of President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s war on drugs.
The on-cam interviews that lasted about six hours in all — or two hours for each interviewee — also focused on gaps in the data on the drug war that PCIJ has gathered over the last 11 months, through dozens of request letters filed with these and other state agencies. PCIJ’s files now host over 2.7 gigabytes of data on the drug menace and the drug war, with data as early as 2010 and as current as May 2017.
PCIJ commended the three agencies for finally fielding a unitary report (#RealNumbersPH) on the status of the drug war, but also raised clarificatory questions on sundry issues that the report has not settled.
Interviewed were:
• Director Derrick Arnold C. Carreon, chief of the PDEA Public Information Office. (PDEA Director General Isidro Lapeña, chair Of Inter-Agency Committee On Illegal Drugs (ICAD) under Duterte’s Executive Order No. 15, was out of town and in his stead, directed Carreon to sit down with PCIJ);
• Police Director Camilo Pancratius P. Cascolan, head of the PNP Directorate for Operations and the PNP Double Barrel Secretariat. (PCIJ had sought interviews with PNP chief, Director General Ronald ‘Bato’ de la Rosa and PSSupt.Dionardo B. Carlos, chief PIO of the PNP but both declined on account of busy schedules.); and
• Secretary Benjamin P. Reyes, until then the chairman of the DDB. Four hours after PCIJ’s interview with Reyes on May 24, 2017, Duterte issued oral orders firing him for his statements that DDB has estimated only 1.8 million total drug dependents, or less than half the four-million figure that the President usually cites in his speeches. “You do not contradict your own government… You’re just a civilian member of a board,” Duterte has said of Reyes.
What follows are the questions and topics PCIJ discussed with the three interviewees.
• In your agency’s plan,what is/are the measures of success of the drug war?
• What reporting and verification mechanisms do you have to verify raw data on the drug war?
• President Duterte organized the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD) through Executive Order No. 15 only on March 6, 2017. It has four clusters (enforcement, advocacy, justice, and rehabilitation and reintegration). What are the tasks and activities of each cluster?
• There are two numbers of estimated drug dependents: four million (Duterte, ICAD, PDEA) and 1.8 million (DDB’s 2015 Survey). Explain how you computed four million.
• PDEA’s formula for deriving the estimated number of drug dependents seems flawed: Why did you compute for 22 million total households in the Philippines when the government says only 48 percent or only 20,160 “drug-affected barangays ” out of the 42,000 total barangays in the country? How many households are in barangays that are not drug-affected?
• Government says the Philippine drug market is a P120-billion industry. How did PDEA get this estimate? How is this P120-billion industry estimate distributed among the different kinds of illegal drugs?
• On the numbers of those killed, arrested, surrendered, operations conducted: How does PDEA keep its figures in sync with the PNP. Do you get, validate, and confirm raw reports from PNP field units?
• On the price of shabu: How did PDEA derive the estimate of P15,000 per gram? Slide 12 of #RealNumbersPH show wrong numbers: P15,000 and up price per gram x 1,645 kilos of shabu seized amounts to P24.675 billion, and not P14.49 billion worth of shabu as the report says had been seized.What is the real amount of drugs confiscated?
• Does PDEA monitor cases of those killed during police operations? Is there any investigation mechanism in place to determine if the killlings were justified and necessary? Does PDEA monitor cases filed with the PNP IAS on these cases?
• Deaths under investigation – how should these deaths be classified?
• How does PDEA dispose of confiscated drugs? What procedures are in place to prevent the revert to the market of seized drugs?’
• How much has PDEA given out as rewards to policemen and other operatives (as mandated by DDB Board Regulation No. 1, series of 2016)? Where did these funds come from?
• What happens to those arrested – were they charged? What has happened to the surrenderees? Where and which agency keeps their surrenderees’ forms?
• What is the concept behind “barangay drug affectation”? Which regions the most affected? Do you have reports on which barangay and how many had been declared cleared?
• How should one determine the success of the drug war? What is its end goal? When will it end?