Gideon Lasco “Antecedents to Rodrigo Duterte’s Drug War: The Anti-Drug Campaigns of Joseph Estrada (2000) and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2003)”

This essay recounts and critically examines the anti-drug campaigns in the Philippines during the presidencies of Joseph Estrada (1998–2001) and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001–10). In January 2000 Estrada’s secretary of the interior, Alfredo Lim, embarked on a spray-painting campaign that was short-lived but nonetheless galvanized public awareness of the “drug menace.” Three years later Estrada’s successor, Arroyo, would launch a “drug war” that mobilized various sectors of society. Rooted in a long-standing moral panic around drugs since the 1970s and the emergence of a “methamphetamine epidemic” in the 1990s, these campaigns were characterized by a willingness to resort to extrajudicial measures, the institutionalization of a (more) punitive drug regime, the politicization of drugs, and a discourse that constructed young people simultaneously as victims and criminals. Such approaches and the paradigm behind them foreshadowed Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs more than a decade later and underscore the enduring valence of drugs and drug issues in contemporary Philippine society.

Keywords: drug wars, drug policy, drugs, populism, vigilantism, history of public health, Philippines