THE war on drugs will not be discredited. On its own terms, it is a roaring success.
As the ongoing United Nations Summit on Drugs shows, and a US State Department report argues: Thaksin’s similar, indeed, the original war on drugs—just as peremptory, so to speak—succeeded.
Not a total victory to be sure, but repeatedly successful campaigns. His overthrow by the junta, which initially wanted to investigate him for human-rights violations (strong irony there), has had to swallow its words: drugs have made a big comeback in Thailand as General Khumchaya bewailed at the UN Summit.
What will discredit the war on drugs is the failure or the unwillingness of the Duterte administration to find the killers of innocent bystanders, like that 5-year-old girl and the young working woman shot three times dead riding a jeepney on the way to work.
These tragedies put deep in doubt the accuracy of blacklists and the rationality of the antidrug campaign. Who cares if politicians are mistakenly included? Why clear them at all? But the killing of innocent bystanders, not to mention those mistakenly tagged in so-called blacklists?
The Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) dismissed the killing of innocent bystanders as mere collateral damage. But the PCCI notwithstanding, there cannot be collateral damage in a democracy where one man means one vote—and one dead innocent chalked up as “collateral damage” and merely charged to experience—is tantamount to a dead democracy.
The essence of democracy is not majority vote, far from it; it is the assertion of individual right, dignity and life over any other consideration. The essence of democracy is not found in the constitutional chapter on executive power acquired by majority vote, but in the Bill of Rights. One dead innocent citizen is one too many for a democracy to accept. (A drug pusher or drug addict is not included in the democratic equation by virtue of the part they play in destroying the rationality that defines humanity).
President Duterte must find the truth about the killing of that girl and of that woman, among others. Pushers and users are not included in this concern.
Nonetheless, the solution—even to this problem of democratic credibility—is even more of the summary solution already adopted:
And that is to find and take out the errant killers of innocent bystanders, while going on killing more pushers—who resist arrest, of course.