Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo wanted a new face to the government’s anti-illegal drugs drive, suggesting a possible new tack that would replace “Oplan Tokhang,” which the public has come to know as vicious and bloody since it has resulted in the deaths of thousands of drug suspects.
The country’s second-highest leader expressed her preference for a possible rebranding of the new anti-illegal drugs campaign during her meeting on Friday with members of the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD), which she co-headed with the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).
She said that because of the senseless killings accompanying Oplan Tokhang, the campaign has reached a certain level of “notoriety” that once you mention tokhang, it connotes a meaning that it was a “war against the poor.”
“I think it is incumbent upon us to change that mindset,” the vice president said.
Before the meeting went formally, Robredo shared her insights and beliefs on the current state of the country’s illegal-drugs problem.
“Number 1, I believe that drug addiction is a serious problem that our country is facing,” she said.
“Number 2, I am all for a strong national policy against illegal drugs, and I am all for a vigorous antidrug campaign. Pero having said that, I also feel that we should do things right. Everything that we’re doing should be within the bounds of the rule of law,” she added.
Robredo does not see the drugs situation as a “problem of crime only,” wherein the enemy is not the Filipinos.
“Our enemy here is drugs. Because drugs is our enemy, we should also look at it not just using the lens of crime, or criminal justice, but also using the lens of health and the fact that addiction is a medical and a sociological problem,” she said.
“I am all for evidence-based strategy and approach,” she also said.
The vice president told the members of the ICAD that despite their differences, she believed that all of them were working for a common goal, and this is for the campaign against illegal drugs to succeed.
“Having said that, I would also like to believe that people expect us to go beyond the differences, and for us to work together,” she said.
Robredo said she went to the meeting, hoping to get a clearer view of the overall illegal-drugs problem in the country.
“I wanted to know the data, because before today, I did not have access to the kind of data that you had access to. So there’s a lot of questions this afternoon, but my request to [PDEA Director] General [Aaron] Aquino is for all the clusters to brief me on what has transpired during the course of the three years—not three years because ICAD was established in 2017, March 2017—so a little over two years,” she said.
Image credits: AP