In his 2023 State of the Nation Address (SONA), President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said he will continue the previous administration’s campaign against illegal drugs.
This time, however, his administration touted a “bloodless” campaign that emphasizes community-based treatment, rehabilitation and reintegration of drug-dependent users – a huge turnaround from his predecessor’s bloody war against illegal drugs.
As of last April, the Marcos administration declared that more than half of the country’s barangays have been “drug-cleared,” boasting that its approach to illegal drugs has been effective so far.
However, according to the latest count of the Dahas Project, an initiative of the University of the Philippines’ Third World Studies Center, about 700 people have been reported to have died due to drug-related killings under the Marcos administration as of June 2024.
Contrary to the bloodless campaign claim of the current administration, Dahas said in its 2023 report that the first six months of the Marcos administration recorded a higher number of drug-related casualties than during former president Rodrigo Duterte’s last six months in office.
(Read: The 2023 Dahas Report: The casualties of Marcos’s “bloodless” drug war)
Check out the status of Marcos’ promises related to drugs and crime:
