The drug war bows to the law
Touted as an irresistible show of force, the drug war had shocked and awed Filipinos into submission for the duration of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency. Years later, that rule of fear is unraveling in courtrooms across the nation, as the oppressive policy that once tyrannized the justice system gets crushed repeatedly and consistently under the weight of due process.
As lower courts tried and convicted scores of drug suspects caught in the brutal antinarcotics drive, appellate courts began performing the unglamorous work of reviewing those convictions, and in many cases, overturning them as a consequence of sloppy law enforcement or deliberate police misconduct, or both.
The numbers tell the story of the drug war’s collapse: In the first five months of 2025 alone, the Court of Appeals (CA) handed down 284 drug-related acquittals, already exceeding the total for all of 2018, as an Inquirer special report has found. The same pattern emerged from 2016 onward, as Duterte’s drug war disproportionately targeted small-time suspects and left thousands dead in extrajudicial killings, according to the report.
Staggering 944 acquittals
Data obtained by the Inquirer show that a yearly average of 46,044 drug cases were filed at the Regional Trial Court level from 2017 to 2024.
Yet in that same period, the CA and the Supreme Court (SC) increasingly overturned convictions. A dramatic spike came in 2019, when the appellate court recorded a staggering 944 acquittals, a 267-percent increase from the previous year. At the SC, drug case acquittals peaked in 2021 at 405, up to 249 percent from 2018.
Far from affirming the supposed effectiveness of the drug war, the judiciary’s record reveals a system inundated with cases so poorly built, or so deeply tainted, that findings of guilt could not stand.
One such case involved Jerome Gaje and Bryan Salceda, who were arrested in a January 2022 buy-bust operation in Makati and later sentenced to life imprisonment. On appeal, the CA found “glaring gaps” in how police handled the evidence, including the absence of recorded weights in inventory receipts.
The appellate court acknowledged the gravity of the drug problem, but reiterated a warning issued by the SC in 2019: “A battle waged against illegal drugs that tramples on the rights of the people, is not a war on drugs; it is a war against the people.”
Chain of custody rule
That warning has echoed across dozens of rulings.
Appellate justices and lawyers alike point to repeated violations of the chain of custody rule under Republic Act No. 9165, the law that governs drug prosecutions. Seized drugs were improperly marked, witnesses were missing, inventories were incomplete. These were not minor procedural slips but major transgressions that compromised entire cases.
As the high court itself stressed in 2018, strict compliance with these rules exists precisely to weed out orchestrated or poorly built cases early, before they clog the courts or ruin lives.
Some have tried to recast these safeguards as rigid obstacles to law enforcement. But the courts’ message has been consistent: the Constitution does not bend to accommodate expediency.
A campaign that relied on fear, speed, and volume could flourish only where scrutiny was weakest. Once subjected to judicial review, there’s no surprise that its foundations would soon crumble.
The contrast is made stark by a recent ruling of the Supreme Court affirming the conviction of three Caloocan police officers for the murder of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos in 2017.
Terror as state policy
In its decision, the high court rejected the officers’ claims of self-defense and ruled that the killing of a minor “could not be considered standard” police practice. The high court found treachery, citing evidence that Delos Santos was defenseless and likely kneeling when he was shot.
That conviction matters not only because justice was done in a single case, but because it exposes the lie that is the foundation of the drug war: It was never just about eradicating illegal drug use, but about sustaining terror as state policy while silencing dissent and feeding the illusion of a government in control.
When evidence is preserved, witnesses are heard, and procedures are followed, courts will hold even armed state agents to account. But cases built on planted or fabricated evidence and unlawful operations will disintegrate before any court of law.
Ultimately, this is why the drug war was a lost cause from the beginning. It is also the perfect argument for rehabilitation and reintegration as more effective instruments in addressing the drug menace than any state-sanctioned murder or illegal arrest.
Fear, as it turns out, is a poor substitute for due process, a realization that must be sobering to the drug war architects, especially Duterte, as he faces charges of crimes against humanity in another country, powerless against a justice system he cannot, for once, control.
