Former addicts support Duterte
About 7,000 Filipinos are said to have been killed in the president’s war on drugs. Yet Ronaldo Rivera, a former user of narcotics, believes that the deadly strategy is working, writes Foreign Correspondent Colin Freeman
DAVAO, PHILIPPINES // In the Philippines’ controversial war on drugs waged by president Rodrigo Duterte, Ronaldo Rivera is an unlikely Duterte ally.
Now 50, he says he smoked his first joint when he was 12, before moving on to shabu, a cheap form of crystal methamphetamine. He became more addicted in his 20s and 30s until he was caught smoking the narcotic in the street.
“I was completely hooked by then,” Mr Rivera says. “I even asked the arresting officer if I could just finish my stash before going to the police cells.”
The officer said no, but treated him well.
After spending nine days in jail, Mr Rivera was made to join the city council’s drug rehabilitation programme, which he credits with keeping him drug-free for the past 14 years.
Other drug users in his home city of Davao in the southern Philippines were not so lucky.
The city’s mayor at that time was Mr Duterte, who used his position to pioneer the hardline anti-drugs strategy that helped to win him the presidency last year.
It was in Davao that reports first emerged of Duterte-backed police “death squads” that were tasked with killing suspected drug users, dealers and other criminals. Between 1998 and 2015, the death squads cleaned up the notoriously crime- ridden city. But it was estimated that as many as 1,000 extrajudicial killings occurred during this period.
Since Mr Duterte began rolling out his national anti-drugs strategy last July, the number of extrajudicial killings has surged to 7,000 or more, say human rights groups, who want the International Criminal Court to investigate the president.
Although Mr Duterte’s critics include charities that treat addicts, Mr Rivera, who now works for Davao city council’s drug rehabiliation programme, is not among them.
Much as he dislikes the killings, which he describes as “collateral damage”, he defends Mr Duterte’s strategy, believing it will tackle the problem that previous governments had ignored.
“If it scares people enough to seek treatment, then it must be good,” Mr Rivera says.
Since Mr Duterte took power, more than 700,000 drug users have formally surrendered to the authorities by registering with neighbourhood leaders, who refer them to government-run rehabilitation centres.
Critics, however, say that there is an insufficient number of rehabilitation centres in the country, much less enough of them to provide high standards of treatment.
Had other mayors followed Mr Duterte’s example in Davao, says Mr Rivera, drug abuse would not be such a major problem in the Philippines today .
As part of Mr Duterte’s antidrug strategy for the city, he also financed what was then one of the country’s only proper rehabilitation schemes.
“It has everything you need – education, assistance, and help after treatment,” Mr Rivera says.
“Plus he was doing this kind of thing back when nobody else was bothering at all.”
Many of the addicts now waiting for treatment are doing so as much out of fear as a desire to kick their addiction.
But what may seem authoritarian in the West is not necessarily seen as such in the Philippines, says Bryan Bajado, Mr Rivera’s colleague and a coordinator at the rehabilitation scheme.
“Does the Philippines need this tough-guy strategy? Perhaps so, yes,” he says. “Duterte is like a strict father, he’s tough when people go wrong and helpful when they make amends.
“Also, he wouldn’t put former drug users like us to head a programme if he didn’t trust us.” Such arguments are at odds with the views of the global drug policy establishment, which increasingly leans towards more liberal approaches, including the decriminalisation of drugs.
Last month, Agnes Callamard, the visiting UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, declared in Manila that the “war on drugs” strategy did not work.
In comments that infuriated the government, the Frenchwoman said such approaches nearly always failed, and “risked invigorating the rule of violence rather than the rule of law”.
Mr Duterte replied by suggesting that she should “go on honeymoon” with Carl Hart, an American professor whose research on drug abuse and addiction questions evidence that shabu (methamphetamine) causes brain damage or violent behaviour. “When I became mayor of Davao City there was always a lot of violence and killing because of shabu,” Mr Duterte said.
It was typical rhetoric from the president, who has long used his “voice of the common man” approach to speak unpalatable truths to the elites.
It accounts for much of his 75 per cent approval rating – and possibly his recent invitation to the White House from US president Donald Trump, who is understood to approve of Mr Dutere’s anti-drug policy. With or without friends in high places, Mr Duterte may also find comfort in the fact that some who support his war on drugs were addicts. As easy as it is for the president to debate visiting experts on drug addiction, it may be more effective in the long run to have former drug users argue Mr Dutere’s stance for him.
“Other people are entitled to their opinion,” says Mr Bajado. “But the majority of our people are in agreement with this strategy, and we think it’s working.”