Category Archives: War On Drugs

1. After Pablo

On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medelln, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar's. The second thing was to check his house.

The last time Escobar had hastily fled one of his residences la Catedral, the luxurious private prison he built for himself to avoid extradition to the United States he had left behind bizarre, enchanting detritus, the raw stuff of what would become his own myth: the photos of himself dressed up as a Capone-era gangster with a Tommy gun, the odd collection of novels ranging from Graham Greene to the Austrian modernist Stefan Zweig. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, arriving after the kingpin had fled, found neat shelves lined with loose-leaf binders, carefully organized by content. They were, says John Coleman, then the DEA's assistant administrator for operations, "filled with DEA reports" internal documents that laid out, in extraordinary detail, the agency's repeated attempts to capture Escobar.

This article appeared in the December 13, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

"He had shelves and shelves and shelves of these things," Coleman tells me. "It was stunning. A lot of the informants we had, he'd figured out who they were. All the agents we had chasing him who we trusted in the Colombian police it was right there. He knew so much more about what we were doing than we knew about what he was doing."

Coleman and other agents began to work deductively, backward. "We had always wondered why his guys, when we caught them, would always go to trial and risk lots of jail time, even when they would have saved themselves a lot of time if they'd just plead guilty," he says. "What we realized when we saw those binders was that they were doing a job. Their job was to stay on trial and have their lawyers use discovery to get all the information on DEA operations they could. Then they'd send copies back to Medelln, and Escobar would put it all together and figure out who we had tracking him."

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The loose-leaf binders crammed in Escobar's office on the ground floor gave Coleman and his agents a sense of triumph: The whole mysterious drug trade had an organization, a structure and a brain, and they'd just removed it. In the thrill of the moment, clinking champagne glasses with officials from the Colombian police and taking congratulatory calls from Washington, the agents in Medelln believed the War on Drugs could finally be won. "We had an endgame," Coleman says. "We were literally making the greatest plans."

At the headquarters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, staffers tacked up a poster with photographs of sixteen of its most wanted men, cartel leaders from across the Andes. Solemnly, ceremoniously, a staffer took a red magic marker and drew an X over Escobar's portrait. "We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go," recalls John Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control office. "There was this feeling that if we got all sixteen, it's not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs."

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Man by man, sixteen red X's eventually went up over the faces of the cartel leaders: killed. extradited. killed. Jos Santacruz Londoo, a leading drug trafficker, was gunned down by Colombian police in a shootout. The Rodrguez Orejuela brothers, the heads of the Cali cartel, were extradited after they got greedy and tried to keep running their organization from prison. Some U.S. drug warriors believed that the busts were largely public-relations events, a showy way for the Colombian government to look tough on the drug trade, but most were less cynical. The crack epidemic was over. Drug-related murders were in decline. Winning the War on Drugs didn't seem such a quixotic and open-ended mission, like the War on Poverty, but rather something tangible, a fat guy with a big organization and binders full of internal DEA reports, sixteen faces on a poster, a piata you could reach out and smack. Richard Caas, a veteran DEA official who headed counternarcotics efforts on the National Security Council under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can still recall the euphoria of those days. "We were moving," he says, "from success to success."

This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piata, swung to hit it and missed.

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2. The Making of a Tragedy

For Caas and other drug warriors, the death of Escobar had the feel of a real pivot, the end of one kind of battle against drugs and the beginning of another. The war itself had begun during the Nixon administration, when the White House began to get reports that a generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned, with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle guerrilla war. For those in Washington, the problem of drugs was still so strange and new in the early Seventies that Nixon officials grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even considered buying up the world's entire supply of opium to prevent it from being converted into heroin. But Nixon was a law-and-order politician, an operator who understood very well the panic many Americans felt about the cities, the hippies and crime. Calling narcotics "public enemy number one in the United States," he used the issue to escalate the culture war that pitted Middle Americans against the radicals and the hippies, strengthening penalties for drug dealers and devoting federal funds to bolster prosecutions. In 1973, Nixon gave the job of policing these get-tough laws to the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan's plaintive urging to "just say no," and her husband's decision to hand police and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to devote more resources to stop cocaine's production at the source, in the Andes. In 1986, trying to cope with crack's corrosive effects, Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses.

The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. "Two words sum up my entire approach," Bennett declared, "consequences and confrontation." Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.

Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was "absolutely nothing" that examined "how each program was or wasn't working," says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes a twelvefold increase since 1980 with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

"What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still," says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. "The other guys were learning just as we were learning," Coleman says. "We had this hubris."

3. Brainiacs & Cold Warriors

"At the beginning of the Clinton administration," Caas tells me, "the War on Drugs was like the War on Terror is now." It was, he means, an orienting fight, the next in a sequence of abstract, generational struggles that the country launched itself into after finding no one willing to actually square up and face it on a battlefield. After the Cold War, in the flush and optimism of victory, it felt to drug warriors and the American public that abstractions could be beaten. "It was really a pivot point," recalls Rand Beers, who served on the National Security Council for four different presidents. "We started to look carefully at our drug policies and ask if everything we were doing really made sense." The man Clinton appointed to manage this new era was Lee Brown.

Brown had been a cop for almost thirty years when Clinton tapped him to be the nation's drug czar in 1993. He had started out working narcotics in San Jose, California, just as the Sixties began to swell, and ended up leading the New York Police Department when the city was the symbolic center of the crack epidemic, with kids being killed by stray bullets that barreled through locked doors. A big, shy man in his fifties, Brown had made his reputation with a simple insight: Cops can't do much without the trust of people in their communities, who are needed to turn in offenders and serve as witnesses at trial. Being a good cop meant understanding the everyday act of police work not as chasing crooks but as meeting people and making allies.

"When I worked as an undercover narcotics officer, I was living the life of an addict so I could make buys and make busts of the dealers," Brown tells me. "When you're in that position, you see very quickly that you can't arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle over and over again of people using drugs, getting into trouble, going to prison, getting out and getting into drugs again. At some point I stepped back and asked myself, 'What impact is all of this having on the drug problem? There has to be a better way.'"

In the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, this philosophy known as community policing had made Brown a national phenomenon. The Clinton administration asked him to take the drug-czar post, and though Brown was skeptical, he agreed on the condition that the White House make it a Cabinet-level position. Brown stacked his small office with liberals who had spent the long Democratic exile doing drug-policy work for Congress and swearing they would improve things when they retook power. "There were basic assumptions that Republicans had been making for fifteen years that had never been challenged," says Carol Bergman, a congressional staffer who became Brown's legislative liaison. "The way Lee Brown looked at it, the drug war was focused on locking kids up for increasing amounts of time, and there wasn't enough emphasis on treatment. He really wanted to take a different tactic."

Brown's staff became intrigued by a new study on drug policy from the RAND Corp., the Strangelove-esque think tank that during the Cold War had employed mathematicians to crank out analyses for the Pentagon. Like Lockheed Martin, the jet manufacturer that had turned to managing welfare reform after the Cold War ended, RAND was scouting for other government projects that might need its brains. It found the drug war. The think tank assigned Susan Everingham, a young expert in mathematical modeling, to help run the group's signature project: dividing up the federal government's annual drug budget of $13 billion into its component parts and deciding what worked and what didn't when it came to fighting cocaine.

Everingham and her team sorted the drug war into two categories. There were supply-side programs, like the radar and ships in the Caribbean and the efforts to arrest traffickers in Colombia and Mexico, which were designed to make it more expensive for traffickers to bring their product to market. There were also demand-side programs, like drug treatment, which were designed to reduce the market for drugs in the United States. To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of each approach, the mathematicians set up a series of formulas to calculate precisely how much additional money would have to be spent on supply programs and demand programs to reduce cocaine consumption by one percent nationwide.

"If you had asked me at the outset," Everingham says, "my guess would have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source countries in South America" that it would be possible to stop cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment. "It's not a magic bullet," says Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, "but it works." The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.

When Everingham's team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was, the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively overseas. "What we began to realize," says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, "was that even if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to abstain forever, it's still a really great deal."

Thirteen years later, the study remains the gold standard on drug policy. "It's still the consensus recommendation supplied by the scholarship," says Reuter. "Yet as well as it's stood up, it's never really been tried."

To Brown, RAND's conclusions seemed exactly right. "I saw how little we were doing to help addicts, and I thought, 'This is crazy,'" he recalls. "'This is how we should be breaking the cycle of addiction and crime, and we're just doing nothing.'"

The federal budget that Brown's office submitted in 1994 remains a kind of fetish object for certain liberals in the field, the moment when their own ideas came close to making it into law. The budget sought to cut overseas interdiction, beef up community policing, funnel low-level drug criminals into treatment programs instead of prison, and devote $355 million to treating hardcore addicts, the drug users responsible for much of the illegal-drug market and most of the crime associated with it. White House political handlers, wary of appearing soft on crime, were skeptical of even this limited commitment, but Brown persuaded the president to offer his support, and the plan stayed.

Still, the politics of the issue were difficult. Convincing Congress to dramatically alter the direction of America's drug war required a brilliant sales job. "And Lee Brown," says Bergman, his former legislative liaison, "was not an effective salesman." With a kind of loving earnestness, the drug czar arranged tours of treatment centers for congressmen to show them the kinds of programs whose funding his bill would increase. Few legislators came. Most politicians were skeptical about such a radical departure from the mainstream consensus on crime. Congress rewrote the budget, slashing the $355 million for treatment programs by more than eighty percent. "There were too many of us who had a strong law-and-order focus," says Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican who opposed the reform bill and serves as co-chair of the Senate's drug-policy caucus.

For some veteran drug warriors, Brown's tenure as drug czar still lingers as the last moment when federal drug policy really made sense. "Lee Brown came the closest of anyone to really getting it," says Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control office. "But the bottom line was, the drug issue and Lee Brown were largely ignored by the Clinton administration." When Brown tried to repeat his treatment-centered initiative in 1995, it was poorly timed: Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had seized control of the House after portraying Clinton as soft on crime. The authority to oversee the War on Drugs passed from Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit liberal, to a retired wrestling coach from Illinois who was tired of drugs in the schools a rising Republican star named Dennis Hastert. Reeling from the defeat at the polls, Clinton decided to give up on drug reform and get tough on crime. "The feeling was that the drug czar's office was one of the weak areas when it came to the administration's efforts to confront crime," recalls Leon Panetta, then Clinton's chief of staff.

4. The Young Guns

The administration was not doing much better in its efforts to stop the flow of drugs at the source. Before Clinton had even taken office, Caas who headed drug policy at the National Security Council had been summoned to brief the new president's choice for national security adviser, Anthony Lake, on the nation's narcotics policy in Latin America. "I figured, what the hell, I'm going back to DEA anyway, I'll tell him what I really think," Caas recalls.

The Bush administration, he told Lake, had been sending the military after the wrong target. In the 1970s, drugs were run up to the United States through the Caribbean by a bunch of "swashbuckling entrepreneurs" with small planes "guys who wouldn't have looked out of place at a Jimmy Buffett concert." In 1989, in the nationwide panic over crack, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had managed to secure a budget of $450 million to chase these Caribbean smugglers. (Years later, when a longtime drug official asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why Cheney had pushed the program, Rumsfeld grinned and said, "Cheney thought he was running for president.") The U.S. military loved the new mission, because it gave them a reason to ask for more equipment in the wake of the Cold War. And the Bush White House loved the idea of sending the military after the drug traffickers for its symbolism and swagger and the way it proved that the administration was taking drugs seriously.

The problem, Caas told Lake, was that the cocaine traffic had professionalized and was now moving its product through Mexico. With Caribbean smugglers out of the game, the military program no longer made sense. The new national security adviser grinned at Caas, pleased. "That's what we think as well," Lake said. "How would you like to stay on and help make that happen?"

Taking a new approach, the Clinton administration shifted most military assets out of the Caribbean and into the Andes, where the coca leaf was being grown and processed. "Our idea was, Stop messing around in the transit countries and go to the source," Caas tells me. The administration spent millions of extra dollars to equip police in Bolivia and Colombia to bust the crop's growers and processors. The cops were not polite Human Rights Watch condemned the murders of Bolivian farmers, blaming "the heavy hand of U.S. drug enforcement" but they were effective, and by 1996, coca production in Bolivia had begun a dramatic decline.

After Escobar fell, the American drug agents who had been chasing him did not expect the cocaine industry to dry up overnight they had girded for the fallout from the drug lord's death. What they had not expected was the ways in which the unintended consequences of his downfall would permanently change the drug traffic. "What ended up happening and maybe we should have predicted this would happen was that the whole structure shattered into these smaller groups," says Coleman, the veteran DEA agent. "You suddenly had all these new guys controlling a small aspect of the traffic."

Among them was a hired gun known as Don Berna, who had served as a bodyguard for Escobar. Double-crossed by his boss, Berna broke with the Medelln cartel and struck out on his own. For him, the disruption caused by the new front in America's drug war presented a business opportunity. But with the DEA's shift from the Caribbean into Bolivia and Colombia, Berna and other new traffickers had a production problem. So some of the "microcartels," as they became known, decided to move their operations someplace where they could control it: They opened negotiations with the FARC, a down-at-the-heels rebel army based in the jungles of Colombia. In return for cash, the FARC agreed to put coca production under its protection and keep the Colombian army away from the coca crop.

Berna and the younger kingpins also had a transportation problem: Mexican traffickers, who had been paid a set fee by the cartels to smuggle product across the U.S. border, wanted a larger piece of the business. The Mexican upstarts had a certain economic logic on their side. A kilo of cocaine produced in Colombia is worth about $2,500. In Mexico, a kilo gets $5,000. But smuggle that kilo across the border and the price goes up to $17,500. "What the Mexican groups started saying was, 'Why are we working for these guys? Why don't we just buy it from the Colombians directly and keep the profits ourselves?'" says Tony Ayala, a retired DEA agent and former Mexico country attache.

The remaining leaders of the weakened Cali cartel, DEA agents say, traveled up to Guadalajara for a series of meetings with Mexican traffickers. By 1996, the Colombians had decided to hand over more control of the cocaine trade to the Mexicans. The Cali cartel would now ship cocaine to Guadalajara, sell the drugs to the Mexican groups and then be done with it. "This wasn't just happenstance," says Jerome McArdle, then a DEA assistant agent for special operations. "This was the Colombians saying they were willing to reduce their profits in exchange for reducing their risk and exposure, and handing it over to the Mexicans. The whole nature of the supply chain changed."

Around the same time, DEA agents found themselves picking up Mexican distributors, rather than Colombians, on the streets of New York. Immigration and customs officials on the border were meanwhile overwhelmed by the sheer number of tractor-trailers many of them loaded with drugs suddenly pouring across the Mexican border as a consequence of NAFTA, which had been enacted in 1994. "A thousand trucks coming across in a four-hour period," says Steve Robertson, a DEA special agent assigned to southern Texas at the time. "There's no way we're going to catch everything."

Power followed the money, and Mexican traffickers soon had a style, and reach, that had previously belonged only to the Colombians. In the border town of Ciudad Jurez, the cocaine trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes developed a new kind of smuggling operation. "He brought in middle-class people for the first time lawyers, accountants and he developed a transportation division, an acquisitions division, even a human-resources operation, just like a modern corporation," says Tony Payan, a political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso who has studied the drug trade on the border. Before long, Carrillo Fuentes had a fleet of Boeing 727s, which he used to fly cocaine, up to fifteen tons at a time, up from Colombia to Mexico. The newspapers called him El Seor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies.

The Mexican cartels were also getting more imaginative. "Think of it like a business, which is how these guys thought of it," says Guy Hargreaves, a top DEA agent during the 1990s. "Why pay for the widgets when you can make the widgets yourselves?" Since the climate and geography of Mexico aren't right for making cocaine, the cartels did the logical thing: They introduced a new product. As Hargreaves recalls, the Mexicans slipped the new drug into their cocaine shipments in Southern California and told coke dealers, "Here, try some of this stuff it's a similar effect."

The product the Mexican cartels came up with, the new widget they could make themselves, was methamphetamine. The man who mastered the market was a midlevel cocaine trafficker, then in his late twenties, named Jess Amezcua. In 1994, when U.S. Customs officials at the Dallas airport seized an airplane filled with barrels of ephedrine, a chemical precursor for meth, and traced it back to Amezcua, the startling new shift in the drug traffic became clear to a handful of insiders. "Cartels were no longer production organizations, whose business is wrapped up in a single drug," says Tony Ayala, the senior DEA agent in Mexico at the time. "They became trafficking organizations and they will smuggle whatever they can make the most profit from."

5. The Lobbyists & the Mad Professor

It is only in retrospect that these moments the barrels of ephedrine seized in Dallas, the quiet suggestion that meth had worked its way into the cocaine supply chain take on a looming character, the historic weight of a change made manifest. Up until methamphetamine, the War on Drugs had targeted three enemies. First there were the hippie drugs marijuana, LSD that posed little threat to the general public. Then there was heroin, a horrible drug but one that was largely concentrated in New York City. And, finally, there was crack. What meth proved was that even if the DEA could wipe out every last millionaire cocaine goon in Colombia, burn every coca field in Bolivia and Peru, and build an impenetrable wall along the entire length of the Mexican border even then, we wouldn't have won the War on Drugs, because there would still be methamphetamine, and after that, something else.

Gene Haislip, who served for years as one of the DEA's top-ranking administrators, believes there was a moment when meth could have been shut down, long before it spiraled into a nationwide epidemic. Haislip, who spent nearly two decades leading a small group at the agency dedicated to chemical control, is his own kind of legend; he is still known around the DEA as the man who beat quaaludes, perhaps the only drug that the U.S. has ever been able to declare total victory over. He did it with gumshoe methodicalness: by identifying every country in the world that produced the drug's active ingredient, a prescription medication called methaqualone, and convincing them to tighten regulations. Haislip believes he was present the moment when the United States lost the war on methamphetamine, way back in 1986, when meth was still a crude biker drug confined to a few valleys in Northern California a decade before the Mexican drug lords turned it into the most problematic drug in America. "The thing is, methamphetamine should never have gotten to that point," Haislip says. And it never would have, he believes, if it hadn't been for the lobbyists.

Haislip was known around the DEA as precise-minded and verbal. His impulse, in combatting meth, was the same one that had pushed the drug warriors after Escobar: the quixotic faith that if you could just stop the stuff at the source, you could get rid of all the social problems at once. Assembling a coalition of legislators, Haislip convinced them that the small, growing population of speed freaks in Northern California was enough of a concern that Congress should pass a law to regulate the drug's precursor chemicals, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, legal drugs that were used in cold medicine and produced in fewer than a dozen factories in the world. "We were starting to get reports of hijacking of ephedrine, armed robbery of ephedrine, things that had never happened before," Haislip tells me. "You could see we were on the verge of something if we didn't get a handle on it."

All that was left was to convince the Reagan administration. One day in late 1986, Haislip went to meet with top officials in the Indian Treaty Room, a vast, imposing space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building: arches, tiled floors, the kind of room designed to house history being made. Haislip noticed several men in suits sitting quietly in the back of the room. They were lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry, but Haislip didn't pay them much attention. "I wasn't concerned with them," he recalls.

When Haislip launched into his presentation, an official from the Commerce Department cut him off. "Look, you're way ahead of us," the official said. "We don't have anything to suggest or add." Haislip left the meeting thinking he had won: The bill he proposed was submitted to Congress, requiring companies to keep records on the import and sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

But what Haislip didn't know was that the men in suits had already gone to work to rig the bill in their favor. "Quite frankly," Allan Rexinger, one of the lobbyists present at the meeting later told reporters, "we appealed to a higher authority." The pharmaceutical industry needed pseudoephedrine to make profitable cold medications. The result, to Haislip's dismay, was a new law that monitored sales of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in bulk powder but created an exemption for selling the chemicals in tablet form a loophole that protected the pharmaceutical industry's profits.

The law, drug agents say, sparked two changes in the market for illegal meth. First, the supply of ephedrine simply moved overseas: The Mexican cartels, quick to recognize an emerging market, evaded the restrictions by importing powder from China, India and Europe and then smuggling it across the border to the biker groups that had traditionally distributed the drug. "We actually had meetings where we planned for a turf war between the Mexicans and the Hells Angels over methamphetamine," says retired DEA agent Mike Heald, who headed the San Francisco meth task force, "but it turned out they realized they'd make more money by working together." Second, responding to a dramatic uptick in demand from the illegal market, chemical-supply companies began moving huge amounts of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine out to the West Coast in the form of pills, which were then converted into meth. Rather than stemming the tide of meth before it started, the Reagan administration had unwittingly helped accelerate a new epidemic: Between 1992 and 1994, the number of meth addicts entering rehab facilities doubled, and the drug's purity on the street rose by twenty-seven percent.

Haislip resolved to have another go at Congress, but the issue ended up in a dispiriting cycle. The resistance, he says bitterly, "was always coming from the same lobbying group." In 1993, when he persuaded lawmakers to regulate the sale of ephedrine in tablet form, the pharmaceutical industry won an exception for pseudoephedrine. Drug agents began to intercept shipments of pseudoephedrine pills in barrels. Three years later, when lawmakers finally regulated tablets of pseudoephedrine, they created an exception for pills sold in blister packs. "Congress thought there was no way that meth freaks would buy this stuff and pop the pills out of blister packs, one by one," says Heald. "But we're not dealing with normal people we're dealing with meth freaks. They'll stay up all night picking their toes."

By the time Haislip retired, in 1997, the methamphetamine problem was really two problems. There were the mom-and-pop cooks, who were punching pills out of blister packs and making small batches of drugs for themselves. Then there were the industrial-scale Mexican cartels, which were responsible for eighty percent of the meth in the United States. It took until 2005 for Congress to finally regulate over-the-counter blister packs, which caused the number of labs to plummet. But once again, the Mexican groups were a step ahead of the law. In October 2006, police in Guadalajara arrested an American chemist named Frederick Wells, who had moved to Mexico after losing his job at Idaho State University. An academic troublemaker who drove around campus with signs on the back of his pickup truck raging at the college administration, Wells had allegedly used his university lab to investigate new ways that Mexican traffickers could use completely legal reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch. "Very complicated numerical modeling," says his academic colleague Jeff Rosentreter. By the time Wells was arrested, the State Department had only just succeeded at pressuring Mexico to restrict the flow of pseudoephedrine, even though Wells had apparently been hard at work for years creating alternatives to that chemical. The lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, Haislip says, "cost us eight or nine years."

For some in the drug war, it was a lesson that even the most promising efforts to restrict the supply of drugs at the source those that rely on legal methods to regulate legally produced drugs remained nearly impossible, outflanked by both drug traffickers and industry lobbyists. The tragedy of the fight against methamphetamine is that it repeated the ways in which the government tried to fight the cocaine problem, and failed racing from source to source, trying to eliminate a coca field or an ephedrine manufacturer and then racing to the next one. "We used to call it the Pillsbury Doughboy stick your finger in one part of the problem, and the Doughboy's stomach just pops out somewhere else," says Rand Beers. "The lesson of U.S. drug policy is that this world runs on unintended consequences. No matter how noble your intentions, there's a good chance that in solving one problem, you'll screw something else up."

6. The General & the Adman

Within the Clinton White House, the reform effort spearheaded by Lee Brown had created a political dilemma. Republicans, having taken control of Congress in 1994, were attacking the administration for being soft on drugs, and the White House decided that it was time to look tougher. "A lot of people didn't think Brown was a strong leader," Panetta tells me. As senior figures within the administration cast about for a replacement, they started by thinking about who would be the opposite of Brown. "We wanted to get someone who was much stronger, much tougher, and could come across that way symbolically," Panetta says.

During the planning for a possible invasion of Haiti, Panetta and others had discovered a rising star at the Pentagon, a charismatic, bullying four-star general named Barry McCaffrey, who had annoyed many in the Pentagon's establishment. In 1996, halfway into his State of the Union address, Clinton looked up at McCaffrey, a lean, stern-seeming military man in the balcony, and informed the nation that the general would be his next drug czar. "To succeed, he needs a force far larger than he has ever commanded before," Clinton said. "He needs all of us. Every one of us has a role to play on this team." McCaffrey, the bars on his epaulets shimmering, saluted. It was one of the president's biggest applause lines of the night.

For the drug warriors in McCaffrey's office, "the General" was everything the languid, considered, academic Lee Brown had not been. "It was clear from the outset that here was a guy who would take advantage of the bully pulpit and who, unlike Brown, would probably be able to get things done," says Bergman, Brown's former liaison. "One thing that surprised us all was how thoughtful he was he wasn't a knee-jerk, law-enforcement guy. He understood there needed to be money for treatment. He prided himself on being very sensitive to the racial issues, and he was sensitive to the impact of sentencing laws on African-American men." McCaffrey imported his own staff from the Southern Command mostly men, all military. They lent the White House's drug operation previously a slow place the kinetic energy of a forward operating base. "We went to a twenty-four-hour clock, so we'd schedule meetings for 1500," one longtime staffer recalls. "His people sat down with senior staff and told us what size paper the General wanted his memos on, this kind of report would have green tabs, this would have blue tabs."

The General's genius was for publicity. "He was great at getting visibility," Carnevale says. McCaffrey held grandstanding events everywhere from Mexico to Maine, telling reporters that the decades-long narrative of impending doom around the drug war was out of date and that if Congress would really dedicate itself to the mission, the country had a winnable fight on its hands. Drug-use numbers were edging downward; even cocaine seemed to be declining in popularity. "We are in an optimistic situation," McCaffrey declared.

For the first time ever, McCaffrey had the drug czar's office develop a strategy for an endgame to the drug war, a plan for finishing the whole thing. The federal government needed to reduce the amount of money it was spending on law enforcement and interdiction. But McCaffrey believed this was only possible once it could guarantee that drug use would continue to decline. "The data suggested very strongly that those who never tried any drugs before they were eighteen were very likely to remain abstinent for their whole lives, but that those who even smoked marijuana when they were teenagers had much worse outcomes," says McCaffrey's deputy Don Vereen. So the General decided to focus the government's attention on keeping kids from trying pot.

The "gateway theory," as it became known, had a natural appeal. Because most people who used hard drugs had also smoked marijuana, and because kids often tried marijuana several years before they started trying harder drugs, it seemed that keeping them off pot might prevent them from ever getting to cocaine and heroin. The only trouble is, the theory is wrong. When McCaffrey's office commissioned the Institute of Medicine to study the idea, researchers concluded that marijuana "does not appear to be a gateway drug." RAND, after examining a decade of data, also found that the gateway theory is "not the best explanation" of the link between marijuana use and hard drugs. But McCaffrey continued to devote more and more of the government's resources to going after kids. "We have already clearly committed ourselves," he declared, "to a number-one focus on youth."

"That decision," Bergman says, "was where you could see McCaffrey begin to lose credibility."

In 1996, less than a year into his term, the new drug czar met Jim Burke, a smooth-talking, silver-haired executive who chaired the Partnership for a Drug-Free America the advertising organization best known for the slogan "This is your brain on drugs." "Burke personally was very hard to resist," one of his former colleagues tells me. "I've seen him sell many conservative members of Congress and also liberals like Mario Cuomo."

Burke told McCaffrey a simple story. In the late 1980s, he said, the major television networks had voluntarily given airtime to the Partnership to run anti-drug ads aimed at teenagers. The number of teenagers who used drugs especially marijuana declined during that period. But in the early 1990s, Burke said, the rise of cable TV cut into the profits of the networks, which became stingier with the time they dedicated to anti-drug advertising. The result, the adman told the General, was that the number of teenagers who used drugs was climbing sharply to the outrage of Dennis Hastert and other conservative members of Congress. As a clincher, Burke handed McCaffrey a graph that showed the declining amount of airtime dedicated to anti-drug advertising on one axis and the declining perception among teenagers of the risks associated with drugs on the other. "I'm ninety-nine percent sure," one staffer at the Partnership tells me, "that it was that conversation that sold McCaffrey."

The General mobilized his office, lobbying Congress to allocate enough money to put anti-drug advertising on the air whenever teenagers watched television. His staff was skeptical. For all of McCaffrey's conviction and charisma, he didn't have much in the way of facts. "That was all we had no data, just this one chart and we had to go and sell Congress," Carnevale recalls. But Congress proved to be a pushover. Conservatives, who held a majority, were thrilled that soft-on-pot liberals in the Clinton administration finally wanted to do something about the drug problem. "At some point, you have to draw a line and say that some things are right and some things are wrong," says Sen. Grassley, explaining his support of the measure. "And using any drugs is just flat-out wrong." To the Partnership's delight, Congress allocated $1 billion to buy network time for anti-drug spots aimed at teenagers.

The General was also starting to make friends beyond the Clinton administration. The drug czar had found a natural ally in Hastert, who had become the GOP's de facto leader on drug policy. The former wrestling coach struck few as charismatic his joyless and drudging style, his form like settled gelatin but his experiences in high schools had left him with the feeling that the drug issue, in the words of his longtime aide Bobby Charles, "had become extremely poignant." Hastert wasn't quite Lee Brown; he believed that the prime focus of the drug war should be to increase funding for military operations in Colombia. But he and his staff had grown frustrated with the exclusively punitive character of drug policy and wanted the Republicans to take a more compassionate stance. His staff had studied the RAND reports and largely agreed with their conclusions. "We felt if you didn't get at the nub of the problem, which was prevention and treatment, you weren't going to do any good," says John Bridgeland, a congressional aide who helped coordinate Republican drug policy. Hastert eventually won $450 million to be used, in part, to expand a faith-based program discovered by Bridgeland: Developed by a former evangelical minister, it brought together preachers, parents and drug counselors to fight the problem of "apathy" through "parent training" and "messages from the pulpit."

But with McCaffrey's emphasis on kids came another, almost fanatical focus: going after citizens who used pot for medical purposes. If he was fighting marijuana, the General was going to fight it everywhere, in all its forms. He threatened to have doctors who prescribed pot brought up on federal charges, and dismissed the science behind medical marijuana as a "Cheech and Chong show." In 1997, voters in Oregon introduced an initiative to legalize medical marijuana in the state. "I'll never forget the senior-staff meeting the morning after the Oregon initiative was announced," Bergman says. "McCaffrey was furious. It was like this personal affront to him. He couldn't believe they'd gotten away with it. He wanted to have this research done on the groups behind it and completely trash them in the press." As the General traveled to the initiative states, stumping against medical marijuana, his aides sneered that the initiatives were "all being mostly bankrolled by one man, George Soros," the billionaire investor who favored decriminalizing drugs.

Even for those who shared McCaffrey's philosophy, the theatrics seemed strange: There he was, on evening newscasts, effectively insisting that grandmothers dying of cancer were corrupting America's youth. His office pushed arguments that, at best, stretched the available research: Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads inexorably to the abuse of harder drugs; marijuana is thirty times more potent now than it was a generation ago. "It didn't track with the conclusions our researchers came to," says Bergman. "It felt like he was trying to manipulate the data."

McCaffrey had taken the drug war in a new direction, one that had little obvious connection with preventing drug abuse. For the first time, the full force of the federal government was being brought to bear on patients dying from terminal diseases. Even the General's allies in Congress were appalled. "I can't tell you how many times I went to the Hill with him and sat in on closed-doors meetings," Bergman recalls. "Members said to him, 'What in the world are you doing? We have real drug problems in the country with meth and cocaine. What the hell are you doing with medical marijuana? We get no calls from our constituents about that. Nobody cares about that.' McCaffrey was just mystified by their response, because he truly believed marijuana was a gateway drug. He truly believed in what he was doing."

7. The Harvard Man

For the cops on the front lines of the War on Drugs, the federal government's fixation with marijuana was deeply perplexing. As they saw it, the problem wasn't pot but the drug-related violence that accompanied cocaine and other hard drugs. After the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, police commissioners around the country, like Lee Brown in Houston, began adding more officers and developing computer mapping to target neighborhoods where crime was on the rise. The crime rate dropped. But by the mid-1990s, police in some cities were beginning to realize there was a certain level that they couldn't get crime below. Mass jailings weren't doing the trick: Only fifteen percent of those convicted of federal drug crimes were actual traffickers; the rest were nothing but street-level dealers and mules, who could always be replaced.

Police in Boston, concerned about violence between youth drug gangs, turned for assistance to a group of academics. Among them was a Harvard criminologist named David Kennedy. Working together, the academics and members of the department's anti-gang unit came up with what Kennedy calls a "quirky" strategy and convinced senior police commanders to give it a try. The result, which began in 1995, was the Boston Gun Project, a collaborative effort among ministers and community leaders and the police to try to break the link between the drug trade and violent crime. First, the project tracked a particular drug-dealing gang, mapping out its membership and operations in detail. Then, in an effort called Operation Ceasefire, the dealers were called into a meeting with preachers and parents and social-service providers, and offered a deal: Stop the violence, or the police will crack down with a vengeance. "We know the seventeen guys you run with," the gangbangers were told. "If anyone in your group shoots somebody, we'll arrest every last one of you." The project also extended drug treatment and other assistance to anyone who wanted it.

The effort worked: The rates of homicide and violence among young men in Boston dropped by two-thirds. Drug dealing didn't stop "people continued what they were doing," Kennedy concedes, "but they put their guns down." As Kennedy reflected on the success of the Boston project, which ran for five years, he wondered if he had discovered a deeper truth about drug-related violence. If the murders weren't a necessary component of the drug trade if it was possible to separate the two perhaps cities could find a way to reduce the violence, even if they could do nothing about the drugs.

In 2001, Kennedy got a call from the mayor of San Francisco that gave him a chance to examine his theories in a new setting. The city had experienced a recent spike in its murder rate, much of it caused by an ongoing feud between two drug-dealing gangs Big Block and West Mob that had resulted in dozens of murders over the years. Could Kennedy, the mayor asked, help police figure out how to stop the killings?

Kennedy flew out to San Francisco and met with police. But as he researched the history of the violence, it seemed to confirm his findings in Boston. Though both Big Block and West Mob were involved in dealing drugs, the shootings were not really drug-related the two groups occupied different territories and were not battling over turf. "The feud had started over who would perform next at a neighborhood rap event," says Kennedy, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "They had been killing each other ever since."

Such evidence suggested that drug enforcement needed to focus more narrowly on those responsible for the violence. "Seventy percent of the violence in these hot neighborhoods comes back to drugs," Kennedy says. "But one of the profound myths is that these homicides are about the drug trade. The violence is driven by these crews but they're not killing each other over business." The real spark igniting the murders, he realized, was peer pressure, a kind of primordial male goad that drove young gang members to kill each other even in instances when they weren't sure they wanted to.

Given that police departments had already locked up every drug dealer in sight and were still having problems with violence, Kennedy thought a new approach was worth a try. "There's a difference between saying, 'I'm watching this, and you should stop,' and putting someone in federal lockup," he says. "The violence is not about the drug business but that's a very hard thing for people to understand."

But in the early days of the Bush administration, police departments were in no hurry to experiment with an approach that focused on drug-related murders and mostly ignored users who weren't committing violence. Kennedy's efforts proved to be yet another missed opportunity in the War on Drugs an experience that made clear how difficult it is for science to influence the nation's drug policy.

"If ten years ago the medical community had figured out a way to reduce the deaths from breast cancer by two-thirds, every cancer clinic in the country would have been using those techniques a year later," Kennedy says. "But when it comes to drugs and violence, there's been nothing like that."

8. Helicopters & Coca

Instead of pursuing the Boston Gun Project and other innovative approaches to fighting drug violence, the federal government decided to escalate its military response in Colombia. For the past decade and a half, cooperation from officials in Bogot had been halfhearted, sporadic and deeply corrupt. But by 1999, the country, it seemed, was on the verge of collapsing into civil war. The drug money that had flowed into Colombia had found its way into the hands of the rebel militia the FARC which had been laying siege to the Colombian government. The Clinton foreign-policy team, having spent the previous few years dealing with the consequences of failed states in Somalia and the Balkans, was deeply concerned about the possibility of a failed narcostate in America's own back yard.

One afternoon in June 1999, a dozen senior Clinton officials filed into the National Security Council's situation room, summoned by Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser. Even though Bogot had ceded control of vast swaths of the country to the left-wing rebels, they were told, recent peace talks had collapsed. "The FARC had basically always been jungle campesinos they were a pretty austere bunch," says Brian Sheridan, who was in charge of the Pentagon's counternarcotics effort at the time and attended the meeting. "All of a sudden, they were leveling these attacks that had gotten more and more audacious." When FARC rebels had emerged from the jungle for a round of peace talks the previous fall, they had brandished brand-new AK-47s and Dragunovs, as if on military parade. One U.S. official observed at the time that the weaponry was "far beyond" what the Colombian army had in a pitched battle, the Clinton administration worried, the Colombian government could plausibly collapse.

The White House advisers weren't the only officials in Washington concerned about Colombia. Earlier that day, two men who attended the briefing Rand Beers of the State Department and Charlie Wilhelm of the Defense Department had gotten a call from the Republican caucus on the Hill. Dennis Hastert, who had been elevated to Speaker of the House six months earlier, wanted to see them right away. "It was kind of unusual," Beers recalls but when Hastert called, you came.

When Beers and Wilhelm arrived, Rep. Porter Goss, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, handed them a piece of paper. It was a copy of a supplemental spending authorization that the Republicans planned to offer immediately. Crafted by Bobby Charles, Hastert's longtime aide, the bill would have more than doubled military aid to Colombia to take on the rebels and narcotraffickers to a staggering $1.2 billion a year. But it was the politics of the situation that worried Beers as much as the money. "It occurred to me that if the administration was going to do anything on Colombia, it better do it soon," he says now, "or the Republicans would once again outflank what they perceived as the I-never-inhaled Clinton administration." Beers told the Republicans he would take a look, and then hurried to Berger's meeting.

Throughout much of the Clinton administration, the hope had been that the United States would be able to reduce its military aid to the Andes as the cocaine epidemic waned. Now, as Berger's group heard from intelligence agents, that hope seemed to be fading. Narcotraffickers were paying off the FARC so they could grow coca in the jungles of Colombia. The FARC were then turning around and using the money to buy weapons to stage attacks on the Colombian government.

Berger decided to act. Rather than oppose the Republican plan, he agreed to negotiate on an assistance package to bail out the Colombian government. The result was Plan Colombia nearly $1.6 billion to escalate the War on Drugs in the Andes. The new program would arm the military and police in their fight against the FARC, launch an ambitious effort to spray herbicide on coca crops from the air and provide economic assistance to poor farmers in rural villages. The initial aid, officials decided, would be heavily concentrated in Putumayo, a rebel-run province in the jungle.

No one is sure what convinced President Clinton to approve such an ambitious escalation in the War on Drugs. But some observers at the time speculated that the critical factor was a conversation with Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, whose state is home to the helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky Aircraft. In early 2000, Clinton unveiled Plan Colombia and Sikorksy promptly received an order for eighteen of its Blackhawk helicopters at a cost of $15 million each. "Much has been made of the notion that this was Dodd looking to sell Blackhawks to Colombia," Beers tells me. He pauses before adding, "I am not in a position to tell you it didn't happen."

Plan Colombia would be the Clinton administration's primary and most costly contribution to the War on Drugs, the major counternarcotics program it bequeathed to the Bush administration. But as with so many other aspects of American drug policy, the plan had an unintended consequence: As it evolved, the emphasis on supplying arms to the Colombian government ended up having less to do with drugs and more to do with helping Bogot fight its enemies. Colombia used the military aid to target the left-wing FARC even though many believed that right-wing paramilitaries, who were allies of the government, were more directly involved in narcotrafficking. "It wasn't really first and foremost a counternarcotics program at all," says a senior Pentagon official involved in the creation of Plan Colombia. "It was mostly a political stabilization program."

9. The Temple of Hope

See the original post here:

How America Lost the War on Drugs - Rolling Stone

THEYRE the sharp-nosed members of the WA Police doing a job that humans cant in the war on drugs.

The canine detectors are some of polices most valuable crime-fighting tools, able to sniff explosives and drugs even in tiny traces.

Its a skill set that keeps them busy, with drug and explosives detection dogs involved in 855 searches, or roughly 70 a month, in the past year.

In that time, the team of 16 dogs 14 trained to detect drugs and two for explosives with their 10 handlers have uncovered 1.5kg of methamphetamine, up to 30kg of cannabis and more than $1 million in cash.

PerthNow was this week invited to see how these super-sensory detectors stay ahead of the pack.

As part of ongoing training to upskill the canines, Titan, a 4-year-old Labrador, was taken through his paces by handler Sen. Const. Kiera Redden at the vacant and run-down East Perth Watch House building and successfully found the methamphetamine and ecstasy stashed in various hiding spots. His reward was his favourite chew toy rolled up towels.

Sgt Nick Berragan, patrol and deployment supervisor at mounted and canine operations, said people kept coming up with ingenious methods to try to mask the smell of drugs in a bid to fool the dogs but the animals werent beaten by that.

The dogs, trained in either active or passive alerts, could filter smells to detect drugs through other odours.

For example, at the recent Groovin the Moo music festival in Bunbury a sniffer dog managed to detect ecstasy pills which had been wrapped in plastic, placed inside a metal canister and inserted into a lemon.

They find drugs when theres no other way they would be found. They find them in underground safes, underground sea containers that have been buried, Sgt Berragan said.

Quite simply (many) drugs wouldnt be found if we didnt have the dogs.

Sgt Berragan said the old watch house was an ideal training ground because the furniture, equipment and distracting odours helped replicate real-life obstacles.

In a change-up, he said the detection dogs, the vast majority being Labradors, were being socialised more with other people and animals to ensure they worked better in crowded environments.

Police are reviving the practice of having dual-purpose dogs, capable of general purpose and detection work.

The first recruit is 14-month-old Malinois, Maygar, expected to be posted to Port Hedland soon.

Go here to see the original:

WA Police dogs fighting the war on drugs | Perth Now - Perth Now

MANILA The Philippines' police chief on Friday stood by anti-narcotics officers and rejected a Reuters investigation that pointed to a pattern of police sending corpses of drug suspects to hospitals to destroy crime scene evidence and hide executions.

President Rodrigo Duterte took office in the Philippines a year ago, launching a bloody war on drugs that has killed thousands of Filipinos.

PREVIOUSLY FROM REUTERS INVESTIGATES:

Philippine police use hospitals to hide drug war killings

Podcast: Dead on arrival in Duterte's drug war

In a television interview to mark the anniversary, Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Ronald dela Rosa appeared irritated by questions about the Reuters report, published on Thursday, and said police carrying out anti-drugs operations had a duty to save lives, even when encountering violent resistance.

He said police were not medically qualified to determine whether a victim was dead or alive and sent victims to hospital as part of operational procedure.

"What do you want, we let the wounded die? You don't want us to rescue his life?" he told news channel ANC.

The Reuters investigation analyzed crime data from two of Metro Manila's five police districts and included accounts of doctors, witnesses, law enforcement officials and victims' families. [nL8N1JQ2NQ]

It showed a pattern of police sending dead bodies to hospitals, preventing thorough crime scene investigations from taking place after the killing of drug suspects. [nL8N1JQ2NQ]

Dela Rosa said Reuters, which has produced a series of in-depth reports into the war on drugs that have questioned official accounts, was "looking for faults" in the police.

"PNP is damned if you do, damned if you don't. Reuters really is looking for faults in us. We have to stand by our police operational procedure that in case of an encounter, if a person is not yet declared dead by the physician, you need to bring him to the hospital."

He added: "Who are the policemen to say they are dead? They are not medical practitioners. If we did not bring them to the hospitals, the relatives might sue us."

A spokeswoman for Reuters said the news agency stood by its reporting.

Duterte's bloody campaign has been condemned by human rights groups and alarmed Western countries due to the high death toll and allegations of systematic extrajudicial killings and cover-ups by police. The PNP rejects those allegations.

FEW SURVIVORS

Reuters looked at police reports covering the first eight months of the drug war, which showed that in Quezon City Police District and neighboring Manila Police District, 301 victims were sent to hospital after police anti-drug operations. Only two survived and the rest were dead on arrival.

In nearly all cases where drug suspects have died during police operations in the year-long crackdown, the official accounts say police fired in self defense. Police say they do not shoot to kill.

Activists, however, say the circumstances behind many of the killings in police sting operations point to executions. A Reuters investigation last year found that when police opened fire in anti-drug operations, they killed 97 percent of people they shot.

The data analyzed in the latest Reuters investigation shows a sharp increase in the number of drug suspects declared dead on arrival in the Quezon City and Manila districts each month.

There were 10 cases when the drug war started a year ago in July 2016, or 13 percent of police drug shooting deaths. By January 2017, the tally rose to 51 cases, or 85 percent, at a time when criticism of Duterte's campaign intensified.

A police commander who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said the increase was no coincidence and police were

trying to prevent crime scene investigations and media attention that might show they were executing suspects.

Human rights groups say the anti-drugs crackdown, the signature policy of the populist Duterte, has been disastrous and has almost entirely targeted the poor, with most of those killed or arrested drug users and small-time dealers, with narcotics kingpins largely untouched.

Dela Rosa said police should not be disparaged for trying to save victims and the removal of bodies from a crime scene did not mean a proper investigation could not be carried out.

"Do not put malice in what the police does," he said. "The

crime scene is there even without the dead body."

(Reporting by Martin Petty and Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Alex Richardson)

WASHINGTON U.S. President Donald Trump will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday, calls that come as frustration builds in the White House over North Korea's nuclear program and overcapacity in the steel market.

BERLIN With an eye on anti-globalization protests brewing in Hamburg before this week's G20 summit, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday leaders will have to focus on sustainable and inclusive economic growth rather than their own prosperity.

Read the original:

Philippine top cop says police try to save lives of drugs war victims - Reuters

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte gives a speech during Eid al-Fitr celebrations marking the end of Ramadan at the Malacanang Palace in Manila on June 27. Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte gives a speech during Eid al-Fitr celebrations marking the end of Ramadan at the Malacanang Palace in Manila on June 27.

The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, celebrates his first year in office Friday. Since becoming president, he has picked a fight with former President Obama, cursed out the Pope, joked about raping women and declared his "separation" from the United States to pursue a more independent foreign policy with new friends China and Russia.

But none of that really matters at home.

What does matter is that Duterte ran for president promising a brutal, bloody war on drugs. And he's delivered.

More than 7,000 alleged drug suspects have died in extrajudicial killings, in encounters with police or gunned down in so-called vigilante killings. The killings have drawn widespread international condemnation, with Human Rights Watch describing Duterte's first year in power as a "human rights calamity."

But here's the thing: Duterte is actually more popular now than when he was elected.

People gather in a bar popular with students from nearby De La Salle University. Alecs Ongcal for NPR hide caption

A year ago, he won the presidency with just under 40 percent of the vote. Today, according to the latest opinion polls, his approval rating is between 75 percent and 80 percent.

"He's a man of his word. He's a man who does what he says he's going to do," says Clarisse Santiago, an 18-year-old student from Manila. "It's because of him that drug-related crime is going down."

"He's like a father for every Filipino," says Daniel Bernardo, 31, a political science Ph.D. student. "I believe in his integrity. Of course, you can't say he's perfect. He has flaws. But he's a game-changer, not a traditional politician."

Both are sitting in one of the many bars across the street from Manila's De La Salle University, where the clientele is mostly middle- to upper-middle class students. The extrajudicial killings in the war on drugs aren't much of an issue, at least among the Duterte supporters here.

"I don't even consider them extrajudicial killings," Bernardo says. "It's a moral killing, in a way. It's like a pest in your house. If you see a cockroach or a mosquito, you'd kill it. For me, if you're a drug user, a drug seller, you're a sickness in society. You need to disappear."

A man walks down a small street in the Arellano district of Manila. Alecs Ongcal for NPR hide caption

If that sounds cold, there's a reason people like Bernardo feel that way, says Jose Manuel Diokno, a longtime human rights activist and the dean of De La Salle University's law school.

"It's because we have a very weak legal system and people are fed up and they want to see results, and they don't seem to mind the shortcuts as long as they get results," Diokno says.

But not everyone is on board.

"If you look at the recent surveys, support among the poor has gone down," Diokno says. "There are less of the poor supporting it because they are feeling the brunt of the extrajudicial killings."

'We're scared of the police'

Arellano, just a few blocks from the university, is a slum area I've been visiting since the drug war began last year. Before then, residents say, there was a lot of drug-related crime here.

Not anymore. The police have rounded up hundreds of alleged drug users and dealers in the past year. And more than a dozen alleged drug suspects have been killed in encounters with police.

"It's safer now, because the addicts are either gone or lying low," says Cindy Medrano, a 26-year-old mother of two.

But there's a new problem, she says: "We're not scared of the addicts. We're scared of the police and how they're harassing us, just barging into our houses and violating our rights."

Cindy's got a 27-year-old brother who recently got out of jail. He stopped at home just long enough to see his mother, she says, then left for the provinces.

"He was scared he'd be a target," she says that he'd be killed. "He said he wouldn't come back as long as Duterte was president."

Down a nearby alley, I go to visit Sylvia Garcia, whose son Aristotle was killed in an encounter with police back in September. I ask her how it's going.

"It's hard," she says. "I've not yet moved on."

Shoppers stroll in a night market in Manila's Arellano neighborhood. Alecs Ongcal for NPR hide caption

She says she's noticed that a lot of young men have moved on or, more precisely, fled in the past few months. Like Cindy, she says the neighborhood is quieter these days and people are afraid of the police.

The family never believed the police explanation that Aristotle was shot while resisting arrest. Garcia says he was executed, plain and simple.

The crime scene photos didn't do much to dispel that argument. But the family didn't fight when the case was closed two days after his death.

Sylvia tells me the policeman who shot her son was killed in a drive-by shooting by vigilantes on a motorcycle a few weeks after her son's funeral.

"Karma," she says, smiling. In the absence of justice, she says, it's better than nothing.

'They can kill you anytime'

The Mallari family, who live across Arellano St. and down another alley, have given up on justice too. Marcelina Mallari's son Robert was killed by police in an alleged drug-related operation in the neighborhood a few months ago. That's the official story, anyway.

Someone on the inside has admitted Robert's killing was a mistake that the cops were after another guy and Robert was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Marcelina Mallari (right) and her daughter Gina share the heartache of losing Robert, Mallari's son and Gina's brother, in the drug war. Alecs Ongcal for NPR hide caption

Marcelina Mallari (right) and her daughter Gina share the heartache of losing Robert, Mallari's son and Gina's brother, in the drug war.

Robert's sister Gina says she knows the police officer who killed her brother. But the family is not about to challenge the official explanation.

"We're scared," Gina says. "If they want to, they can kill you anytime, anywhere."

There are two young men in the family they still need to protect her son and her nephew.

"That's the reason we decide to be quiet, not rock the boat anymore," she says. "What if another victim will be one of my family because we pushed for justice?"

"So you've given up on justice because you fear retribution," I say.

Baby Roseann plays with her two aunts and mother Rachel Quebec (far right) in their small house. Roseann's father, Clarence Jepadre, 17, was stabbed and killed last year. His body was found with a packet of marijuana and a note saying, "I'm a pusher... Don't be like me." Alecs Ongcal for NPR hide caption

"Yes. Exactly," Gina says.

"Yes," her mother agrees. "We don't have a choice."

About a hundred yards down the alley and around the corner, I visit Rachel Quebec. Her boyfriend, Clarence Jepadre, 17, was killed a few months back, too stabbed nine times, then wrapped in plastic, with a packet of marijuana next to him and a sign attached to his body that read "I'm a pusher. I'm a robber. Don't be like me."

The police blamed vigilantes. The family blames the cops.

Quebec doesn't know who to blame, and she's struggling emotionally and financially. She can't get used to the idea of Clarence began gone. Sometimes their baby daughter, Roseann, will point at the door and say "Papa, papa," she says. And sometimes she and other family members feel Clarence's presence late at night.

"We believe his spirit is lingering because his case isn't solved yet," she says. "There's been no justice. Clarence can't accept what's happened to him, so his spirit just lingers here, waiting."

Undocumented killings

It's going to be a long wait. The homicide detective in charge of the case, Nino Sadsad, says the investigation is ongoing, but he has no leads. And this neighborhood is not even one of the worst affected by the war on drugs.

The emotional cost of losing a loved one isn't the only struggle families face. There's the financial cost, too, says De La Salle University's Diokno, who also chairs the Philippines' Free Legal Assistance Group.

A policeman stands guard near the body of a suspected drug dealer on a street in Quezon City, Metro Manila, on March 1. Police investigators said the victim was shot and killed by unidentified men. Romeo Ranoco/Reuters hide caption

"They have to pay as much as 15,000 to 25,000 pesos to recover the bodies of their relatives," Diokno says, about $300 to $500 a huge sum for poor families who still have to arrange a funeral as well.

So many have come up with a workaround.

"Some relatives, some families, don't wait for the scene-of-the-crime operatives to claim the body," Diokno says. "As soon as the police or the vigilantes, or whoever is responsible, commit the extrajudicial killings, before the authorities can come, [the families] get the body and bury it so they don't have to pay."

Diokno says those killings don't get recorded. He believes many others go unrecorded these days, too. His legal assistance group receives reports from communities of people just disappearing. And nobody, he says, knows where the bodies are.

He doesn't believe the commonly accepted estimate of 7,000 dead since the war on drugs began last year, and thinks the number may be between 10,000 and 12,000.

Meanwhile, Duterte has given no indication he'll relent anytime soon though even some of his staunchest supporters think maybe he should.

"The problem with Duterte now," says Daniel Bernardo, the Ph.D. student, "is that he's so much focused on drugs, he's missing a lot of opportunities."

By that, he means fighting corruption another Duterte campaign pledge and a whole lot of other priorities, like improving infrastructure and creating more jobs at home to keep people from having to work abroad. Overseas remittances the money sent home by workers abroad account for some 10 percent of the Philippine gross domestic product.

Meanwhile, the Philippine military is battling ISIS-linked militants on Duterte's home island of Mindanao, a challenge that will test Duterte in the months to come. But the defining factor of his first year as Philippine president is the other war the war on drugs which shows no sign of ending.

See the article here:

Philippine President Duterte's First Year In Office Is Marked By Bloody War On Drugs - NPR

Moro Islamic Liberation Front. AFP FILE PHOTO

DAVAO CITY Moro rebels have formalized their cooperation with the governments anti-drugs campaign with the signing on Friday of an agreement on how to go about with anti-illegal drugs operations in areas under the insurgents influence.

Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) chief Isidro Lapea said the protocol of cooperation on anti-illegal drug operations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) was a good manifestation to help in President Dutertes campaign to rid the country of illegal drugs.

There was an offer by the MILF to help (in anti-drug operations) in MILF-influenced areas so we have to involve them, Lapea said.

The signing between representatives of the government and the Moro rebel group came a year after the Duterte administration launched its illegal drugs crackdown which saw the seizure of tons of illegal drugs valued in the billions of pesos.

While existing mechanisms between the two sides through the Ad hoc Joint Action Group (AHJAG) have to be considered, Lapea said the protocol on cooperation would take away some of the steps so anti-drug operations in MILF areas could proceed more expeditiously.

Whats important here was the cooperation, the manifestation of support and assistance in the anti-illegal drug campaign which we appreciate very much, the PDEA chief said.

He said the AHJAG mechanism, created to oversee the ongoing ceasefire agreement between the biggest Moro insurgent group in the country and the government, would be used in the conduct of operations to avoid miscommunication and miscoordination that might lead to violent incidents on the ground.

Undersecretary Catalino Cuy, officer-in-charge of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) said the protocol came about following a lengthy series of meetings between representatives of both sides, and that MILF-held areas have also been affected by the drug menace.

He said the Moro rebel group in 2015 has prohibited the use, sale and proliferation of illegal drugs in Bangsamoro areas, declaring the illegal substance as haram or forbidden in Islam.

With the war on drugs declared by President Duterte and the MILF campaign against illegal drugs, (both parties) agreed to coordinate and cooperate in the campaign. The partnership aims to produce optimum result in the war on drugs, Cuy, a retired police general, said.

An agreement of cooperation and coordination in anti-drugs operations in MILF-influenced communities was signed by representatives of both parties on July 2016, Cuy said.

He said another meeting was called which resulted to the drafting of an anti-illegal drugs protocol that would clearly define the roles of the government and the MILF in the conduct of anti-illegal drug activities.

The commitment of the MILF in addressing the drug problem in their areas will greatly help the war on drugs. The support of the MILF just show that we could be one in our common goal of providing drug-free communities, the DILG official said.

Lapea said the MILF can also do anti-drugs activities in their areas like conducting citizens arrests against drug suspects who would then be handed to government authorities.

Lawyer Abdul Dataya, AHJAG representative for the MILF, said their role was limited to coordinating with government forces and furnishing of list of drug personalities in their area.

Asked if they would also take a direct part in anti-drug operations in communities under their influence, Dataya said: We leave that to regular (government) forces. But the MILF will assist in trying to prevent possible a mis-encounter. We have a group who will coordinate with the Armed Forces.

Chief Supt. Pierre Bucsit, AHJAG representative for the government, said the protocol would serve as a standard to be followed in anti-illegal drugs operations in MILF-influenced areas.

Dataya said the protocol would be applicable in MILF areas in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and MILF camps in Central Mindanao, Western Mindanao and some parts of Davao Oriental and Compostela Valley, in Davao region.

In the ARMM, Lapea said illegal drugs are rampant in 366 of Maguindanaos 509 barangays (villages), or about 72 percent while Lanao del Sur, which includes Marawi has 313 of its 1, 059 villages or 29 percent, affected.

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MILF joins Duterte's war on drugs | Inquirer News - Inquirer.net

Jocelyn stands near the casket at the wake of her husband, Cesar Carillo, Friday, dawn. He was abducted by masked men on June 6, then a day later, he was found dead, his body showing signs of torture. Carillo was one of two suspected victims of drug related killings in Navotas June, 9, 2017 Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News

MANILA- What happened was a necessity.

A year since President Rodrigo Duterte assumed office, his top cop maintains the necessity of the campaign that launched the Philippines in the international stage anewthe war on drugs.

What happened was a necessity para magbago, a necessity element for the change weve been looking for, Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Director General Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa said Friday.

The police have been the lead agency in Dutertes anti-narcotics campaign with its series of Oplan Tokhang (knock and plead) operations throughout the country. Police officers knock at the homes of suspected drug peddlers and users and plead for them to surrender.

The campaign has earned praises and criticism from different sectors locally and internationally. It has also earned the PNP allegations of abuses, particularly extrajudicial killings.

Police data shows that nearly 3,000 drug suspects have died in presumed legitimate police operations in Duterte's campaign against illegal drugs.

Out of 9,432 homicide cases from July 1, 2016 to March 31, 2017, or the first nine months of the Duterte administration, 1,847 have been found to be drug-related, with 5,691 cases under investigation.

Duterte's anti-narcotics drive has also resulted in a 26.45 percent drop in the estimated total drug market and a 28.57 percent reduction in index crimes, according to police data.

Though controversial, the campaign has improved the security climate said Dela Rosa, noting that he has heard stories of Filipinos saying they felt safer to walk in the streets.

If we did not declare war on drugs, this problem could not be addressed, could not be unmasked, could not be uncovered, Dela Rosa said.

National Capital Region Police Office Regional Director Oscar Albayalde said the campaign is simply a fulfillment of Dutertes campaign promise.

I think hes (Duterte) making good [on] his promise with regards to his war on drugs. Hes very serious on this and this has direct effects on the different crimes that has been going on or that are being committed particularly here in Metro Manila, he said.

DIFFERENT APPROACH?

Asked if the police plan to take on the narcotics problem as a public health issue as other sectors have called for, Dela Rosa said that he, as a police officer, has to look at the problem from his own perspective.

For me, being a police officer, I must treat the problem from my own point of view. Being a police officer, that's a problem on criminality, he said.

We feel that the problem is ours. Lately, nakita natin na kailangan the problem should be addressed by the whole of government approach and, lately, [the] whole nation, he added.

The PNP chief, however, welcomes help from the Department of Health in approaching the problem as a health concern.

Siguro dapat DOH na ang mag-treat ng problem as a health problem, he said.

NO MERCY

Under Dutertes leadership, the police force has been hounded by several controversies such as corruption, involvement in the drug trade, and abuse of power. But throughout all of these, the PNP has enjoyed the backing of the president.

Albayalde said Duterte's support for the police should not be taken as a signal to commit abuses.

I think its within the limits of the law. Hindi niya (Duterte) ibig sabihin na when you violate the law, you still have his back, Albayalde said, adding that he believes the police have not abused their power because of the presidents assurance of protection.

Dela Rosa, on the other hand, maintained that he has no mercy for erring cops.

I think I am the chief PNP who has dismissed a lot of people already in so short a time, he said.

I have no mercy as far as itong mga erring personnel, mga ninja cops, itong mga personnel ng PNP na involved sa sindikato, I have no mercy for them. I have to hit them head on, he said.

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PNP maintains war on drugs a 'necessity' - ABS-CBN News

Its probably just a coincidence that three of our 10 favorite songs from June premiered on the same day, the very first day of the month. It kicked off a calendar page that offered album announcements from cornerstone acts like Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age, that saw Halsey and Katy Perry become the first two women to top the Billboard 200 in 2017, and that featured new album drops from Phoenix and Fleet Foxes.

Its not that those artists didnt have entries worthy of our monthly wrap-up (well, except for Perry). It just speaks to how strong of a month June was that cuts like J-Boy from Phoenix or Run from Foo Fighters had to be left off the list. Also notable was a surprising return to form from Iron & Wine with Call It Dreaming, DJDS continuing to elbow their way into mainstream consideration with Trees on Fire, most everything from the Lorde and Vince Staples albums, and a trio of Radiohead tracks that have remained dormant for two decades.

What we did settle on was a pair of Atlanta rappers striking gold in collaboration, a standout track off the debut LP from TDEs first lady, a former Vampire Weekend member shining in technicolor, and our favorite sister act doing their best to honor the memory of the Miami Sound Machine. Plus, you know, those three songs that kicked off June 2017 to be a quite memorable month for music.

Philip Cosores Executive Editor

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Top Songs of the Month: Vince Staples, The War on Drugs, and Lorde - Consequence of Sound (blog)

Editors Note: Starting June 25, the Inquirer will run on its print, online, and social media platforms a series of stories, reports and commentaries on the socioeconomic impact positive and negative that President Duterte has made in his first year in office. The articles will focus on how the former Davao City mayor has coped with the challenges of the presidency in five major areas that Filipinos consider most important in their lives: peace and order, traffic, economy, governance and foreign policy. This evaluation of the administrations achievements and shortcomings will take into account what Mr. Duterte had promised to do during last years presidential campaign, his June 30 inaugural speech and his July 25 State of the Nation Address.

In this picture taken June 29, 2017 shows smokes billows inside Malawi City as the military launched fresh airstrikes on controlled positions of Islamic State-inspired terrorists as fighting rages for 36 days now.

Distraught housewife Camalia Bauntos husband is trapped in their house in Marawi City and she is pinning her hopes of being reunited with him on President Dutertes vow to crush a small band of Islamic State (IS)-linked terrorists who have brought destruction to the once proud Muslim city in Mindanao.

The Baunto couple, along with their extended family, voted for Mr. Duterte in 2016, helping to propel the former Davao City mayor to the countrys top government post on a promise to bring peace and order to a region long ravaged by armed conflict.

But that promise has been overtaken by deadly events. Abu Sayyaf gunmen, the Maute group and their foreign allies, who have all pledged allegiance to IS, launched a daring raid on Marawi on May 23.

After more than a month of fighting, the death toll has surpassed 400303 IS gunmen, 75 soldiers and police, and 44 civilians, according to military figures.

An estimated 200 residents, including Bauntos husband Nixon, are believed to be held hostage by the gunmen or trapped in the fighting that has transformed the once-vibrant city into a desolate landscape of bombed-out buildings resembling war-torn Aleppo in Syria.

I am losing hope, Baunto told the Inquirer. I am begging the President to rescue him. Is this the peace he had promised us?

Martial law

In reaction to the siege, Mr. Duterte declared martial law in the entire Mindanao while he was on a visit to Russia with all his top defense and security officials and cut short his trip to return home.

The President said he would not allow IS to gain a foothold in the Philippines.

The siege of Marawi was triggered by an attempt by security forces to arrest Isnilon Hapilon, the leader of an Abu Sayyaf faction who had been appointed by IS emir, or leader, in Southeast Asia.

The Armys 1st Infantry Division spokesperson, Lt. Col. Jo-Ar Herrera, said at first that Hapilon was backed by 15 gunmen, but as the firefight escalated, hundreds of others emerged from their hideouts around the city, engaging the surprised troops.

Miscalculation

Analysts said that since Mr. Duterte assumed office last year, his administration appeared to have focused much of its resources into carrying out a war on drugs, which had left at least 10,000 suspected drug users, dealers and traffickers dead.

Officials have neglected the telltale signs of Islamic radicalism among a new crop of Islamists in Mindanao, analysts said.

Richard Javad Heydarian, a political analyst at De La Salle University, said the Marawi conflict puts into focus whether [Mr. Duterte] has a proper appreciation of the sheer scale of the problem in his own backyard.

Without a doubt, the siege of Marawi has been the greatest crisis for Mr. Duterte so far, despite the myriad of controversies surrounding his key policies, including the bloody war on drugs and diplomatic spats with traditional allies, Heydarian said.

We are not only talking about the prospect of a distant caliphate under the flag of Isis, but a potentially disastrous contagion of terror across his home island of Mindanao, he said, using another name for IS.

Undercut ratings

The destruction of Marawi will likely undercut his sky-high approval ratings, particularly among Moros, who initially saw him as their sole and most powerful voice in imperial Manila since the founding of [the] Philippine republic, Heydarian said.

The Marawi siege also forced the government to reassess its independent foreign policy that had seen Mr. Duterte lambast the Philippines traditional ally, the United States, in favor of Russia and China.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, martial law implementer, has since sought help from American troops and welcomed Australian military assistance.

In many ways, it has been a sobering and heart-wrenching month for a President who sincerely cared for the people of Mindanao, yet didnt manage to fully optimize existing intelligence and security networks to anticipate, prevent and effectively contain the terrorism conundrum in his home island, Heydarian said.

Complacency

Mr. Dutertes fixation on the war on drugs had overshadowed the equally important war on terrorism, according to Rommel Banlaoi, head of the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research, which has been advising the defense establishment on threat groups.

The fighting in Marawi was an outcome of continued downplaying of threats from pro-IS groups, Banlaoi said.

This government attitude of downplaying the threat resulted in unintended complacency in gathering actionable intelligence information necessary for the development of an effective preemptive counter-terrorism plan, he said.

The battle in Marawi City could have been prevented had government forces seriously exercised due diligence in gathering reliable and accurate intelligence information while enemy forces were still in [the] inception stage, Banlaoi said.

Military officials have strongly denied that there had been a failure of intelligence on IS plans in Marawi.

Long fight

On Tuesday, the President said he wanted to finish the fighting soon and saw no satisfaction even in winning it.

I already had the complete picture and I knew that it would be a long fight, he said at the Eid al-Fitr celebration in Malacaang.

In his report to Congress on the martial law declaration, Mr. Duterte said the Maute group, which had 253 men by late 2016, was bent on turning all of Mindanao into an IS province. As much as 75 percent of Marawi had been infiltrated by the Maute group and the Abu Sayyaf, his report said.

Solicitor General Jose Calida said martial law was justified because of the festering rebellion of the Maute group, which had allied with Hapilons Abu Sayyaf faction and pledged allegiance to IS.

Calida said the more dangerous Maute group had transmogrified into an invasion force of foreign terrorists to launch attacks in the Philippines if its members could not travel to Syria to fight alongside IS.

Despite shelling and bombing runs, the terrorists remain well-entrenched in a small area in the city, posting snipers at strategic points in Marawi to prevent the advance of troops more accustomed to jungle warfare than urban fighting.

The Marawi siege has alarmed the countrys Southeast Asian neighbors.

They fear that IS is trying to set up a stronghold in Mindanao, which it could use as a springboard to launch attacks across the region.

Maute brothers

Mr. Duterte had earlier dismissed the Maute brothers as drug-addled former cops.

In truth, Omarkhayam Maute studied in Egypt where he embraced Islamic militancy, according to various intelligence groups.

He taught at a madrasah in Indonesia, where his wife is from, but eventually went back home to pursue his dream of establishing a state purely for Muslims in Mindanao.

His older brother, Abdullah, was more radical and inherited their father Cayamoras ideals as a former official of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Cayamora and wife Farhanadescribed by police as the groups financierhave been arrested separately.

The brothers had set up Daulah Islamiyah, which the police had played down as a group of small-time crooks operating near Lanaos forests.

The group grabbed national headlines in September last year when they claimed responsibility for bombing the Presidents hometown of Davao, killing 15 people.

Explore on our special anniversary site the Inquirer series of multiplatform reports and commentaries on the gains and challenges during President Duterte's first year in office. Daily content begins June 25 till July 24.

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War on terror took backseat as Duterte focused on drug war ... - Inquirer.net

Were sitting in a cramped and claustrophobic house in the middle of a rabbit warren of small alleyways in the fishing town of Navotas, Metro Manila. Its 40 degrees outside.

The tiny room where we sit is seething with something that feels like panic, or shock. Or grief that is waiting for its chance to be felt.

I am trying to find the words to ask the mother of two dead sons how she chose which of them to bury.

Photo: Maria Misa De Pirini in her home in Navotas on 12 September

Maria Misa De Pirini's sons Danilo and Aljon were both casualties in the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly war on drugs. At the time of their killings, Duterte had been in office for three months and his drug war had already led to the deaths of an estimated 4,000 drug users by police and vigilante killers. Today, a year after the presidents inauguration, that figure is now over 9,000.

Maria was one of many working-class people who voted for Duterte, believing his promises to end both corruption and the scourge of drug abuse. A perceived representative of the working class, he won in a landslide victory. But his promises led to unfettered, state sanctioned killing of many of the Philippines most vulnerable people: the poor, who often use drugs to escape their everyday realities.

Photo: Quezon City Jail was built to house 400 inmates but, as of September 11 2016, currently houses 3669 inmates. The prison has seen a drastic increase in intake since the war on drugs was announced, with 62%of inmates incarcerated for drug cases. The jail has a planned 'decongestion' strategy, but prison officials admit progress is slow. 16 September.

On the first day of Duterte's term in office, his war on drugs claimed four lives, on the second, 14 and on the ninth, 30. That number soon rose. Often the victims heads would be wrapped in packing tape, with crude messages scrawled on cardboard next to the bodies, labelling them drug pushers or users. Bodies piled up.

The day after Aljon was murdered, I joined a group of local journalists covering the Night Beat essentially the reporting of the latest drug war killings and their aftermath. That night, we got a call saying there had been a drug-related killing in a nearby city in Metro Manila called Caloocan. We drove to the scene in convoy.

Photo: Police officers conduct Oplan Tokhang, "Knock and Plead" operations, in Payatas, Quezon City, on 16 September.

Guided by the blue and red lights of the police and SOCO vans, journalists readied their gear, switched on LED lights, and moved quickly down the dark, tungsten-lit alleyways towards the scene. The body of a man, lying face down, confronted us as we arrived. He was shirtless, wearing dark blue shorts and sandals. His torso was covered in blood that body collectors tried to wipe off before they loaded him on to the stretcher to carry him away.

From what we could gather, the man was shot and killed by police during whats known as a buy-bust operation an undercover sting operation where a police officer impersonates a drug dealer. When the would-be drug buyers attempt to resist arrest, they are shot and killed by the undercover officer on site.

Photo: The wife of an unidentified man killed by police sweeps away his blood after his body is removed from the scene on 22 September.

For a moment there was a stillness to the scene. Camera shutters clicked, SOCO outlined the positions of bullet cartridges on the ground in chalk, their torches occasionally illuminating the dead mans face. Jarringly, a rooster crowed. Two women sat metres away and cried. We later found out that one of them was the deceased mans wife. She threw buckets of water on the concrete outside her home to wash away the blood; crimson rivulets streamed down the alleyway. No witness statements were taken, and all of us knew that no one would be held to account for this mans murder.

We didnt stay for long a colleague got a call saying there had been another drug killing 10 minutes away.

Instead of resolution, or some promise of justice, the media covering this drug war can only capture thousands of different portraits of grief.

The woman who cries while she washes her husband's blood away.

The mother who must chose which of her sons to bury.

Photo: Relatives gather before Adonis Dela Rosa's entombment.

When I first spoke to Maria Misa De Pirini after the murders of both of her sons, she appeared visibly shocked that they had become fatalities in a drug war that she had initially supported. She spoke in monotone, so disbelieving in her grief that her own tears seemed to surprise her. Like they belonged to someone else.

Aljon had been the first to die.

He had told his mother he used drugs to make his body stronger for work at the fish factory where he and his brother found employment. It's more likely that being high made his job bearable.

On 21 September 2016, masked men came to Maria's house demanding to take Aljon and his friend, a known drug pusher, away. Maria pleaded with them, asking for mercy. She knew that if they took him, she night never see him again. Her pleas fell on deaf ears.

Photo: An unidentified man is killed in a suspected buy-bust operation in Caloocan. 22 September.

Police later told Maria that two bodies had been found under a bridge close to her home. When she arrived she saw one of them was Aljon. His body was beaten, with two gunshot wounds to the chest, one to the head.

After Aljon died, Maria feared that Danilo might be next. She told him to keep a low profile in the area. Those warnings were in vain. A week later, masked men suspected to be police apprehended him and the men he was seeking refuge with. He was severely beaten, shot and dumped under the same bridge where Aljon's body was found.

No one was arrested for either murder, and any hope of justice for her sons was a luxury that Maria simply could not afford. Maria's poverty had also forced her into making a terrible choice, heartbreaking in its banality. Which sons body to bury, and which to leave unclaimed?

When I tried to ask Maria how she had made that choice, my fixer and I were sitting on the floor of her two-square-metre living room-cum-kitchen. The floor above us had been used as a space to sleep for Maria, her daughter, and until very recently Danilo and Aljon.

Danilo's name tag for the recycling depot he sometimes worked at still hung up on the wall of her living room, next to a teddy bear and a Catholic statue.

My question got lost in translation, misinterpreted as me asking Maria which of her sons she loved the most. Her response was confused, and I couldnt understand it.

Photo: Cemetery workers hoist Dela Rosas coffin into his tomb.

Days later, I went with Maria to the Navotas funeral parlour where Danilo's body was being kept. The parlour's director, Orly Fernandez, admitted that they had run out of space to store the bodies that had flooded in as the war on drugs intensified. He showed me how bodies were piled on top of each other, sometimes three deep, on the floor.

He then pointed to Danilo's body, lying on the floor wrapped in a blue and yellow Hello Kitty blanket.

Maria had asked Fernandez for a discount on Danilo's burial, and he agreed, but it was still too expensive for her to afford. She was forced to accept that the only way to bury her son was to leave his body unclaimed, and hope that would get included in the next mass burial of unclaimed bodies the funeral parlour conducted. Four months later, in January 2017, Danilos body was buried in the grave of a woman also killed in a police drug operation. The grave bears only the womans name, as Maria couldnt afford a tombstone for Danilo.

Her choice, I now know, was driven by the fact that Aljon's funeral parlour did not offer the option of a pauper's burial. It wasn't an epic dilemma driven by love or connection, but a painfully simple choice, driven by Maria's economic reality.

If I am honest, I wanted there to be a powerful emotional force behind Maria's choice. One that would subsume her sons battered bodies, the bullet holes to their heads. The Hello Kitty blanket wrapped around Danilo's broken bones. The unmarked grave he shares with another dead drug user.

Without that choice being something beyond these simple horrors, this story effectively just captures murder that is normalised, genocide that is considered unremarkable and carnage that is, somehow, acceptable.

We sweep the blood away and move on. Like there is no heartbreak here. DM

Fixing and additional reporting by Guill Ramos

Shaun Swingler spent a month in the Philippines reporting on the drug war for various news outlets. In collaboration with Chronicle, he produced a short documentary film on the drug war which premiered at Encounters Documentary Film Festival where it won the EYE Youth Jury Award. A trailer for the film can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPjRVknCW_Y

Photo: Undertakers transport the body of an alleged drug suspect who was killed by police in Sitio San Roque, Quezon City, on 14 September.

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Reporter's Notebook: A year into Duterte's bloody war on drugs, little has changed - Daily Maverick

Photo Credit: a katz / Shutterstock

*Editor's note: In this monthly blog series, the Drug Policy Alliance will examine the nexus between the War on Drugs and law enforcement practices that result in the mass criminalization, incarceration and dehumanization of communities of color. These pieces will reflect on the ways in which the institutions of policing and prosecution- both driven by calls for law and order in the wake of the War on Drugs- continue to function as instruments of reinforcement for the overarching structural racism on which the drug war was founded.

Over the past several weeks, the details surrounding the tragic killing of Jordan Edwards have been revealed under the intensely watchful eye of a public that continues to face a seemingly never-ending flood of stories recounting instances of police brutality and thepervasive lack of justicefor black victims on the receiving end of police misconduct.

Outside of a media sphere permeated by meticulously crafted, state-serving narratives marked by the use of coded language as a form of fear mongering that encourages brutalization in carrying out the war on drugs and cultivates public apathy towards the victims of such violence, a situation in which a police officer responding to a neighbors call aboutpossible underage drinkingthat ends with the use of lethal force on a car full of frightened kids could not be dressed as anything other than a senseless act of violence. This murder reinforces the message that the protections associated with the assumption of innocence and positive police discretion towards instances of youthful indiscretionare not privileges extended to black youth.

Further, a failure to also identify this situation as one where the duty to protect and serve was superseded by aninstitutional obsessionwith policing and restricting the autonomy of black people would require willful ignorance of thehistory of enslavement and subjugationof black people in this country.

Jordans story is not anomalous. The explosion in exposure of police brutality across the nation and subsequent reflection on my own experiences with law enforcement while growing up in Dallas quickly led me to the sobering realization that any of the nights I enjoyed not long ago, when I was Jordans age, could have ended in tragedy. The price of this realization has been an existence marred by constant feelings of fear and anxiety about whatcouldhappen and how my personalrelationship with drugs might be used in an attempt to strip me of my humanity posthumously.

As a result, I often find myself preemptively policing my actions, my speech, expressions of my emotions, my movements, and even my writing, but none of these things have proven adequate in protecting me from potentially volatile interactions with law enforcement or figures that have been endowed with authority to use force by whatever institution employs them.

Knowing that I am not alone is deeply saddening.

What is much more devastating, however, is reading in theDallas Morning Newsthat kids who occupy some of the same spaces I once did experienced such a degree of psychological trauma from Jordans death and similar situations that they feel they have no choice but to forfeit simple joys of youth like playing basketball and partying with friends.

Living with the psychological burden imposed by the constant threat of state violence is not freedom. We cannot begin to chip away at thehyper-criminalization of black and Latino youthuntil we end the war on drugs. If not, the reality most of America is privileged enough to enjoy - the assumption that an interaction with law enforcement will not end in their demise - will remain an aspiration at best.

When I was in elementary school, a large part of the schools efforts to convince us to just say no to drugs involved encouraging us to dare to be different. As an adult, I am imploring the powers that be and those who have been complicit in cultivating this drug war climate to put the same amount of time and resources into daring police to allow all youth the space to enjoy their lives without fear of those entrusted with the responsibility of protecting them.

This piece first appeared on the Drug Policy Alliance Blog

Zacchaeus Stantonis policy associate with the Drug Policy Alliance.

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The War on Drugs Places 'Black Joy' in the Line of Fire - AlterNet