Who is winning Duterte’s war?

With more than 7,000 dead (most of them from poor families), over a million having surrendered to cops, some 5 million house “visits”, thousands of arrests, and tonnes of seized methamphetamine (shabu), can we say with any conviction that President Duterte’s “war on drugs” has made progress?
No one denies that the scale of the problem is enormous – five million drug addicts as customers for a multibillion-peso business comparable to the biggest enterprises in the country. Worse still, it is now a grand public-private partnership, flourishing because of collaboration from people in authority.
Only after the murder of a Korean national by ranking police officers right inside the Manila headquarters of the Philippine National Police did the administration start looking into the “internal loopholes” of its anti-drug campaign.
President Duterte, before launching his war on drugs, should have initiated an internal cleansing of the police force. Instead, little is being done to address rampant corruption in the force and the collusion of law enforcers with criminal and drug syndicates. This is one key reason that past efforts to eliminate the drug menace failed.
As such this latest war’s defective strategy and poor execution should concern us all. More so because of the shroud of secrecy surrounding the process of determining a target.
Influential and powerful individuals from the public and private sectors have been positively identified as linchpins in the drug trade. But we have yet to see authorities bring them to justice. Does this mean that the administration is targeting only the poor, the desperate pawns in this ugly trade?
The drug problem will not be solved unless its roots are properly removed.
Beverly L Longid
International Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self-Determination and Liberation