Before his inauguration as President back in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte spoke about how he believes that it’s hopeless to rehabilitate people who use drugs and how death penalty is his ideal drug policy. In the latest report from the Philippine National Police (PNP) released in November 2019, the agency reported 220, 728 arrests and 5,557 deaths from the anti-illegal drug operations conducted since Duterte took office. However, the Human Rights Watch contended in January this year that the number of deaths from the “murderous war on drugs” could have reached more than 27,000. Although this anti-drug campaign has been denounced by many, including the United Nations, Philippine police forces have stated that they won’t be letting up during the pandemic.
Due to the war on drugs, the Philippines was named the fourth most dangerous country in a report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. Similar to the number of casualties, it’s hard to get the real number of people who have successfully gone through drug rehabilitation in the country. PNP stated that between 2018 to 2019, there were 485, 295 surrenders who entered reformation programs. The Department of the Interior and Local Government said in 2019 that a total of 178,353 surrenderers graduated from government community-based drug rehabilitation programs.
Under the Duterte administration, it has become more imperative to stir conversations on drug policy that tackle alternatives to incarceration and counter-campaigns against the dehumanization of people who have fallen into a life of drug dependence. We talked to non-profit organization NoBox Philippines about how health and social services and compassion must be at the forefront when addressing this issue.
Hey, NoBox PH! Before anything else, how has everyone been? Have you been keeping safe and have operations been continuing under quarantine?
Like most civil society groups, we’ve been staying safe at home and helping in communities where we can. Operations have moved mostly online or over the phone, and we’ve been exploring how to maximize the virtual space in ways that are accessible to the communities we want to help.
You want to remove the box of conventional thinking about drug use and drug policy. Can you tell our readers what NoBox is and how it seeks to accomplish that?
The way we see it, we’ve always been conditioned to talk about illegal drugs and the people who use them in certain ways—sometimes well-intentioned, most of the time harmful and stigmatizing. We want to create spaces where we can have more open conversations about a very taboo topic, where the person is at the center, and not our history of misinformed moralizing. We usually do this through events like our “Support. Don’t Punish” campaigns for the past few years (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019) and through workshops with any sector that wants to explore a broader perspective on how people experience drugs and how we treat people who use drugs.
Your organization is grounded on the philosophy of harm reduction. Can you expound on that?
Harm reduction refers to a range of public health policies designed to lessen the negative social and/or physical consequences associated with various human behaviors.
It believes people engage in any behavior because it has function and value for them—and this extends to things like substance use. It acknowledges this reality and the risks that a person could be exposed to and finds ways to keep people safe, healthy, and well regardless of what informed choice they make. It’s a lot like good sex education and reproductive health policies that way, but for drugs.
What’s the story behind the launch of NoBox? How far has the group come since then?
Before we were NoBox, we were a small residential center in Cubao. Our services were grounded on the philosophy of harm reduction: doing what it takes to keep you alive and safe, and that there is no such thing as being too kind.
Realizing that problems go deeper and everything is connected, we expanded into a civil society organization. Still providing services, we are now also working on reforming drug-related policies and laws. We are advocating for ones that recognize and respect the human being on the receiving end: your inherent dignity should not and cannot be taken away. You deserve to be treated as a person simply because you are, and as a reason, we believe that’s more than enough.
We heard that NoBox founder and director Ma. Inez Feria once spoke at the United Nations as a panelist on drugs and health. Can you share with us what she shared then? What are some of the other things that the group has done so far?
That panel was just a few months shy of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (and also a few months before our country’s own “war on drugs” was intensified). It had been an opportunity to share the Philippine experience with drugs and harm reduction. You’ll find that a lot of the issues people who use drugs faced back then haven’t gone away now, and have only worsened after being forced to surrender and thousands being extrajudicially killed. Our jails have always been overcrowded by people charged with minor drug offenses, compulsory treatment has always exposed people who use drugs to abuse, and our policies still prioritize witch hunts in the form of drug testing, punishment, abusive “tough love,” and criminalization over genuine help.
We’ve made strides despite these challenges. People are waking up and seeing that we need to start looking at how we experience drug use in a more compassionate way, but we need to create more rights-based institutional changes and cultural shifts if we want to improve our situation.
Who do you work with for these projects? Do you have community partners?
A lot of sectors experience drug use and drug policies in different ways—urban poor communities, professionals, national government agencies, local government units, LGBTQI+, women, persons deprived of liberty—so we’ve been expanding that reach as much as we can. We’re open to partnering with any group or sector that needs to start examining how drug use and harmful policies impact their communities.
NoBox released a statement calling for the emergency release of persons deprived of liberty during the pandemic. Can you walk us through the talking points of that position and the reintegration measures the government should consider?
NoBox Philippines has always believed that jails do not benefit people who use drugs in the long run. There are definitely well-meaning services in there. but jail overcrowding and a lot of other institutional and structural issues make it more harmful than not. As of last year, our jails are five times overcapacity nationally, with overcrowding reaching over 1,000% in some jails. More than half of those are for nonviolent drug offenses. Because of this and limited resources, persons in detention are more likely to have weak health due to malnutrition and poor hygiene.
Our jails are a disease outbreak waiting to happen. If we want to eliminate COVID-19 entirely from our country, we can’t leave behind a sector that’s been rendered vulnerable. We welcome and are grateful that our jails and courts have started the process of decongestion—a process that should have been done long ago—but we need to do more, especially in making sure that people released actually have somewhere to go back to, and that people charged with low-level drug offenses aren’t left behind in all this.
There’s a campaign with the tag #SDP2020FocusonWomen which highlights the need to end violence against women who use drugs. Considering how the Duterte administration is still enacting a “War on Drugs,” what are the campaign’s demands and what steps are being taken for them to be met?
The campaign wants us to take a closer look at how women experience drug use and drug policies. We want to create spaces where women’s voices are heard—where they can participate in and lead conversations about policies and responses that affect them. For example, in the Philippines, we don’t yet see how health and social services respond to the unique experiences of women who use drugs. Our jails have policies that are supposed to create gender-responsive services and a gender-sensitive environment, but these aren’t as well implemented as they should be. In communities, oftentimes, it’s the women who are left behind to take care of their families, especially when they lose someone to extrajudicial killings.
We join the Women’s Harm Reduction International Network in their call — There are several steps we need to undertake for us to support women who use drugs. Among them is to uphold the right to autonomy of women, and to allocate resources and long term funding to harm reduction services and networks that are led by and meaningfully involve women who use drugs. The full press release on the campaign can be accessed online.
You are currently working on an interactive online experience called “Caligtangan.” Can you tell us more about this and how it ties with your other projects?
Caligtangan is our execution for this year’s “Support. Don’t Punish.” Campaign. Support. It’s a global grassroots-centered initiative in support of harm reduction and drug policies that prioritize public health and human rights.
This interactive online experience will immerse the reader into the everyday life of being a part of the Caligtangan community. The story unfolds with the help of the reader. Stay tuned for the launch this mid-July!
We want readers to know what women involved with drugs go through every day. The hard decisions they have to make for their family and their community. We want to show that the experiences of a woman imprisoned for using or selling drugs aren’t black-and-white and that we need policies and services that reflect that.
How can we support your group’s advocacy?
You can learn more about NoBox’s initiatives and activities by liking our Facebook page, Twitter account, and Instagram account.
We’d love for you to join us in creating our community in Caligtangan by sharing and interacting with our posts and being the first to find out when it will be out via our website.
Photo courtesy of NoBox Philippines
Follow Preen on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Viber
Related Stories:
This trans Filipina speaks out on isolation and discrimination in Tokyo’s immigration facilities
Did she stutter? Beyoncé calls to jail the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor
Must-reads on police brutality for citizens of a country afraid of its people
Pride 20 is fighting back, Manila Police will be hearing from their lawyers