Former President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs is immoral and illegal.

It amounts to state-sanctioned murder and causes grave and widespread

human rights violations. It furthers these issues while severely
undermining the social fabric and rule of law in the Philippines, making
it ineffective in addressing the challenges and damages that the illegal
drug trade and use represent to society. In the Philippines, mass
incarceration of accused drug users is also happening in addition to the
killings. More than a million users and small-time dealers, according to
the administration, have willingly "surrendered" to the authorities. Many
people act in this way out of dread of dying otherwise.

The Philippines should adopt fundamentally different strategies:

dragnets targeting low-level pushers and users should end right once, as
should orders to police to shoot-to-kill and calls for extrajudicial
killings. If such directives are given, encounter killing investigations and
any additional extrajudicial killings must be prosecuted. In the short
term, the widespread culpability may prevent any policy that would aim
to look into and bring charges against police, administration, and
community council members who were engaged in the state-sanctioned
killings.

Establishing a truth commission will be crucial if political leadership in

the Philippines changes. But in the interim, either grant all currently
detained drug suspects fair trials or let them go. Reducing violent crime
and violent militancy must be among the top priorities of the law
enforcement and rule of law elements of drug policy plans. President
Duterte claims that there are drug trafficking networks operating in the
Philippines. The country should gather solid intelligence on these
networks and focus on their middle operational layers rather than low-
level dealers. It should also target their corruption networks in the
government and law enforcement.