FORMER PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte was surrendered by the Philippine authorities to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on March 12, 2025, following a controversial arrest at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. This development eventually sparked mass protests—both for and against Duterte.
Duterte’s image as a strongman who violates human rights divides the nation. While supporters believe his arrest was a political move by his enemies, the left-behind families of Filipinos killed during Duterte’s bloody War on Drugs praise the ICC’s charges of crimes against humanity as justice.
From Duterte’s time as the Davao Death Squad head in November 2011 to his tenure as President of the Philippines in March 2019, the ICC described his sanctioned bloodbath as “an attack against a civilian population.”
The effects of Duterte’s War on Drugs, amid political turmoil and policy shifts, haunt the illegal drug trade—and the people who rely on the money it generates to survive. The drug market begins with the stories of Filipinos desperate to live.
Blazing up
Today, Filipinos in the illegal drug industry are more discreet. The only way to find these dealers or pushers now is by word of mouth or pure luck; new people need to be vouched for.
For Smith*, a current college student and a marijuana dealer, getting caught selling drugs is incompetence. Every activity should be direct, but impersonal—especially a deal. They prefer a “hands-off” approach that only takes 30 minutes. “[Buyers] message, I have it sent, then we’re done,” they remark.
Smith sees selling weed as a temporary gig. They only started dealing because they knew the “right people,” yet they only earned enough to pay for commutes, hangouts, and treatment for their undisclosed medical conditions.
The act of dealing is so casual that Smith lazes on their office chair and obscures details with jokes. They bury every aspect of the job in quips, like how trying other dealers’ products is “trading shoes,” while getting weed delivered is referred to as “Biyaya ng Diyos (Grace of God).”
Smith insists that they are a responsible dealer. They do not sell the more dangerous products like shabu that Duterte claimed to be irreversibly damaging to the body, and more importantly, they do not sell to addicts.
To check for drug dependence, Smith observes if one is buying cheap drugs and cocktails. In their eyes, this means a buyer cares less about what they put into their body, since they are only looking for the next hit.
However, most of Smith’s customers are not like that: they are from a higher socioeconomic class. To afford the fancy labelled weed gummies, carts, and disposables that Smith usually sells, they would have to be rich.
Every product is priced based on potency. They do not give specifics, but recent weed prices can reach Php 1200 per gram, based on a 2024 Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency bust.
From using to selling, all of Smith’s weed is meant for leisure, with the fun relying on the strain of cannabis: uppers, downers, or hybrids. In their experience, taking an upper makes someone hyperactive, a downer makes them “chillax,” and a hybrid is a mixture of both reactions.
Smith speaks from experience. They also use weed for fun, but never at parties, bars, or clubs. Getting high means becoming vulnerable, and people can take advantage of the altered state of reality, time, and movement. “I have a lot to live for. I want to finish school, okay? I want to make sure my parents retire,” they exclaim.
Yet, as Smith continues speaking, they fidget and toy with objects hidden from view. No matter how integrated selling drugs is in their routine, they insist on separating their identity as a seller and an actual person.
They whisper about friends of friends who were framed for drug use. Allegedly, these individuals were completely clean and simply displeased the wrong people. It is a mistake Smith refuses to make.
Smith sympathizes with those framed for drug use or dealing. However, when someone who actually participates in the illegal drug scene is busted, “that’s just how it is.”
Survival in the drug industry is simply staying out of everyone’s business and keeping one’s side of the street clean. It is what seemingly distinguishes a good dealer from a bad one—and Smith is sure they are the former. After all, to Smith, drugs are just business, and only a poor businessman fails in the drug trade.
Well into withdrawal
While dealers like Smith take care to keep a careful distance from their buyers, the traces of each exchange continue to linger elsewhere. On the other side of the market, an earthy, grounded scent hangs in the air from residual traces of marijuana shoved into various paraphernalia littered around the room.
At first glance, Kans’* bedroom is a shrine to his vices—a poster of psychedelic mushrooms hangs above the mattress, framed by an assortment of joints, carts, and lighters on his bedside table, all collated lovingly across his now eight years in the industry.
His descent into addiction began when he was 12—at least three years younger than the average first-time drug user—with a friend who introduced him to cannabis, the only drug he continues to take today. He describes marijuana use as “euphoria without a crash,” as it heightens feelings of creativity and focus.
The same friend later introduced him to shabu. Kans calls his relationship with the drug a short-lived addiction that created intense, simultaneous feelings of exhilaration and melancholy, which also triggered episodes of depression, extreme anger, and exhaustion.
As the addiction swept through his nervous system, it also affected his personal life, creating casualties in his close circles. Consumed with finding his next fix, family arguments became increasingly frequent, and he began finding fewer reasons to care about the people he loved.
He describes the aftermath of his addiction as a process of regaining lost parts of himself. “I’m okay now, but there was around six to seven months where I felt like I wasn’t a person, where I disassociated from reality, and felt like my emotions weren’t really there.”
December 31, 2024 marked Kans’ first arrest. After being caught with a small amount of cannabis on himself, police officers in civilian clothing shoved him into the back of a patrol van. There, they took turns hitting him before forcing him and his fellow arrestees to turn their fists on each other.
As the patrol made its way through the city, bruises began blooming across his chest and forearms. The swelling under his skin stopped, but his thoughts honed to a single point: his family.
“Luoya sa akong mama oy (I feel so bad for my mom)… She warned me not to go out on New Year’s,” he says. “All I could think about was how much she would cry when hearing what happened. And my sister, she looks up to me so much, and I’m taking that away from her.”
Still afraid of what could happen, Kans and his companions were taken to a dark corner of the police station where officers asked them a series of questions regarding their suppliers. Whenever the group failed to cooperate, the officers would physically assault the group and occasionally threaten them with statements alluding to possible sexual assault in prison.
“In that moment, I thought, ‘This is where they’re going to shoot me’,” Kans confides.
However, the trigger was never pulled. After confirming that the group was indeed “only” using and not selling, the officers sent them home with a warning. Kans never felt so grateful.
Yet, that night was not his first encounter with cops—at that point, different police officers had been both his captors and his co-users. “I’ve done shabu before with [Bureau of Jail Management and Penology] personnel—in a room, we were all shirtless, bunch of guys sweating and everything,” he laughs.
Today, Kans is an honor student whose family cannot afford his dream of going to law school. He is currently a college scholar studying in the hopes of helping advance his advocacies, including a staunch opposition to extrajudicial killings and “[the commercialization of] weed as a large potential market that may benefit the economy.
Kans’ experience reflects the human cost of the drug market. But sellers and buyers are only two parts of an industry that has been infiltrated by a third-party: while dealers supply the market and users sustain it, the state attempts to dismantle it.
Buy-bust barons
Government response to the illicit drug market has been fierce, creating a third competing actor for industry dominance. Buy-bust operations and high-speed chases across unlit farmland have become a regular occurrence in Sarge’s* line of work.
Eight years ago, after graduating from Criminology, Sarge decided to pursue a career in law enforcement—this was at the beginning of the Duterte administration.
On what has changed since then, she states, “During Duterte’s time, there weren’t so many drugs in circulation.” According to police intel, drugs have become significantly cheaper: a 5-gram pack of meth was formerly worth Php 25,000; now, it can go for as low as Php 12,000.
According to some drug users Sarge has in custody, the quality has gone down as well: the high fades quicker.
Despite the change in product, police protocol has remained consistent regardless of who sits at the head of Malacañang. The standards required of the Philippine National Police by law are clear: “We are the ones that will have to answer to any misstep or abuse of authority, not the President,” says Sarge.
She adds, “We see a corrupt cop scamming money from speeding vehicles on the side of the road—[news media] calls them crocodiles—and people assume that’s how it is, but it’s not. Maybe in 10 of us, there’s one.”
Sarge gives a run-through of the entire buy-bust operation: one officer becomes the pusher-buyer, who accompanies the confidential informant to the agreed-upon transaction setting; another becomes the arresting officer, and the rest of the squad acts as backup.
Once cash and drugs are exchanged, the pusher-buyer leaves a missed call for the arresting officer, who then rushes up to the area and completes the arrest. The seller is frisked, informed of the Miranda Doctrine, searched for further possession, told that the arrest is being recorded, and then brought to the station.
At the station, the evidence is laid out, drugs and non-drugs are separated and labelled, and all individuals involved in the operation are made to sign the inventory sheet. Here, two drugs frequent the records: marijuana and shabu.
While marijuana finds itself most commonly among minors and casual users, shabu has become the choice product of habitual users and drug pushers.
According to Sarge, while the effects of shabu and marijuana are largely similar, users of shabu experience difficulty falling asleep and do not feel hungry. This results in shabu users significantly losing weight and gaining distinct mannerisms across facial expressions.
However, addiction doesn’t just wound, it festers. Across Sarge’s career, she’s seen its effects fracture across family lines: from developmental deficiencies resulting from drug-addled pregnancies to domestic violence due to drug-induced psychosis. College savings blow away with the ghost of the shimmery white powder in the wind, and homes feel increasingly small as fathers and sons speak to themselves in voices not their own.
“Sometimes we talk to the girls we arrest,” she says. “We busted a pregnant woman—she was eight months pregnant when we caught her.”
Arresting drug users in such dire straits is not ideal, so Sarge explains how barangays implement interventionary programs such as the Barangay Drug Clearing Program to convince known users and sellers to surrender themselves. The program lasts for around six months and holds a graduation ceremony for its attendees, at which point, the state holds them to no additional obligation than sobriety.
Yet for some, liberation and intoxication are intertwined. Sarge recalls several instances where suspects’ response to their arrests has been far from peaceful: where they attempt to flee, or worse, to seize control of an officer’s gun.
This is what she’s most afraid of and the reason each preoperative briefing begins and ends with a prayer: to hope tonight is not the night she’ll have to fire her gun.
Faces to the numbers
The tripartite tug-of-war between dealers, users, and law enforcement has made the Philippine Drug Industry an institution embedded in the very fabric of the nation’s identity. From ballot boxes to blood feuds, the country has split across class and party lines in search of absolution.
National and international organizations, politicians, journalists, and citizens have discussed at length how many the Drug War has killed, how it has affected drug use and production, and how it has affected crime. Duterte’s arrest marks a crossroads: a point in history that determines how statistics become precedent for future policy.
Yet, despite millions of stories driving the billion-peso industry and its effects on security and the economy, discussions regarding the lived experiences of individuals embedded in it often fade into the background.
As the nation reckons with the legacy of the drug war in the wake of Duterte’s arrest, the true measure of justice lies not solely in court rulings, crime rates, or shifting policies, but in whether Filipinos choose to center the whats, wheres, and whys rather than the how many.
