Oplan Tokhang: The Philippines' War On Drugs

Oplan Tokhang: The Philippines’ War on Drugs
This essay represents the collective vision of our group in response about Oplan
Tokhang: The Philippines’ War on Drugs, drug addiction is a problem faced by many
people of the world today. The War on drugs campaign was started in order to define
and further reduce the illegal drug trade and fight against drug dealers. The word
tokhang, is a made-up portmanteau of the local words for knock (tok) and plead
(hangyo) and describes police operations that were launched by the Duterte
administration in July of 2016 that involved officers going door to door to root out drug-
related offenders. The phrase has become synonymous with the Duterte
administration’s notoriously brutal war on drugs, with the word tokhang becoming
directly associated with the killings related to the policy. The controversial policy has
been suspended twice in its history—both in 2017.
Oplan Tokhang is the Duterte administration’s campaign against illegal drugs, a

problem that the President claimed has affected millions of Filipinos. Officials claimed
the anti-drug campaign improved the peace and order situation in the country but critics
said the crackdown has encouraged human rights abuses. More than 4,000 people
have died since President Duterte launched his war on illegal drugs in 2016. Officials
insist the administration does not condone extrajudicial killings and other illegal
acts. Oplan Tokhang involves visiting the homes of suspected pushers and users to
convince them to give up illegal drugs. The term – derived from the Visayan words
“toktok” and “hangyo,” meaning to knock and to make an appeal – later became
associated with extrajudicial killings after many of those who surrendered to authorities
and admitted to pushing or using drugs were killed by unidentified assailants or in
alleged shootouts with police. President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs in the
Philippines is morally and legally unjustifiable. Resulting in egregious and large-scale
violations of human rights, it amounts to state-sanctioned murder. It is also
counterproductive for countering the threats and harms that the illegal drug trade and
use pose to society — exacerbating both problems while profoundly shredding the
social fabric and rule of law in the Philippines.
The rising death toll of the drug war drew criticism from human rights groups.
Official sources reported that as of July 2019, some 5,375 drug personalities have been
killed in police operations. Human rights groups estimate that the overall death toll,
which includes EJKs, has reached beyond 25,000. The International Criminal Court
(ICC) started investigating Duterte for crimes against humanity in February 2018. Public
opinion surveys by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) in late 2019 indicated that 75%
of Filipinos believe that many human rights abuses took place as a result of Oplan
Tokhang.
The war on drugs generated enormous interest among Filipino social science
researchers, most of whom are sensitized to the human rights perspective. Conflicting
death toll estimates, along with contrasting assessments of the extent and severity of
the drug problem, matched the debates surrounding the morals and politics of the anti-
illegal drug campaign between the authorities, human rights groups, and experts,
including social researchers.Narratives of suffering from those arrested and widows of
those who were killed compose the backdrop of a new, violent Philippine reality. This
reality is attended by the paradox of hyper-stigmatization of drug use by the current
political and criminal justice regime vis-à-vis the “normalized proliferation” of drugs,
articulated by the term talamak (chronic), commonly used by arrested persons, media,
and much of the public.
Most of whom are working-class individuals in their early and middle-to-late

adulthood arrested in the first year of Oplan Tokhang on drug-related charges. They
claimed that they had been wrongly arrested, that police officers planted evidence, and
that they were mistreated or tortured to confess their guilt. They described their plight
as walang kalaban-laban (defenseless) against the police who forcefully descended into
their dwellings. Despite their tragic personal plight, many of them still support Duterte’s
anti-drug campaign because it represents a decisive action against a worsening drug
situation that had long been ignored. Clearly, the “drug offenders” are very much a part
of the “penal populist” public that generated support for Duterte’s presidency in 2016. A
moral panic about the rising number of drug addicts and unsafe neighborhoods propped
up the resurgence of penal populism, a term proposed by John Pratt as an approach
that adopts more punitive measures against criminality based on public sentiments
rather than on empirical evidence or expert opinions. This can be observed in public
opinion polls released by SWS at the end of 2019 indicating that Duterte enjoyed a net
satisfaction rating of 72% from Filipinos, and his war on drugs a net satisfaction rating of
70%.
In conclusion, Despite the participants’ defense of their drug use, the

denouement of my conversations with them was their recognition that shabu is a
“destroyer of families,” “a source of criminality,” “ultimate evil,” and “a national problem,”
which must be eradicated. One key aspect of their narrative is that the misinformed
police made a mistake in capturing them instead of targeting those who are truly guilty:
addicts who commit heinous crimes to support their vice, money-hungry traffickers who
exploit them, and corrupt policemen who extort money from the addicts and peddlers.
Social science research on the Philippine war on drugs can indeed contribute to
providing evidence-based policies, whether these involve the methodological expertise
of quantifying addiction levels, reconceptualizing drug use typologies, or interpreting
public opinion on criminality. The challenge for sociology is that it must heed caution
about frameworks that offer binaries that reduce the drug question in the Philippines to
a battle between the good guys versus bad guys, the addicts versus those who are not,
and the good cops versus bad cops. More importantly, sociologists researching the war
on drugs must be wary of privileging penal elitism, a term which Victor Shammas uses
to refer to an overvaluation of scientific or expert opinion and dismissal of a public
regarded as emotional, irrational, or simplistic. Such self-reflexivity then calls for
sociologists to be comfortable with contesting narratives within groups of social actors
and between the supposed camps of the political and moral spectrum that makes up the
public.

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Oplan Tokhang: The Philippines’ War on Drugs

Oplan Tokhang is the Duterte administration’s campaign against illegal drugs, a

Most of whom are working-class individuals in their early and middle-to-late

In conclusion, Despite the participants’ defense of their drug use, the

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