What if we killed all those addicts?

How many drug addicts are there really? Two counts are given, the police’s and President Rodrigo Duterte’s. And they widely vary. If we go by the former’s figures, then the latter’s would look sorely understated – by half.

Quoting the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, Duterte often laments that four million Filipinos are hooked on shabu (meth). That’s grim, for it means that four million of our 22.3 million families directly are plagued by drugs. It’s wrong to say that the four million addicts make up only four percent of our 100-million population. Addicts do not converge on one corner of the archipelago versus the rest of Filipinos, but belong to families like yours and mine.

Philippine National Police records are grimmer. It reports 5.5 million homes subjected to Operation Tokhang in July-Dec. 2016. Tokhang means “toktok-hangyo” or knock-and-persuade. On that many homes the cops knocked to persuade the druggies to desist, or else.

The PNP’s Tokhang list came from the barangays, which best know who the users and pushers are in the locale. The 5.5 million was just 70 percent of the list, the PNP says. Cops would spend the next six months visiting the 30-percent balance, or 2.36 million households.

Adding up the 5.5 million visited and the 2.36 million yet-to-be-visited addicts equals 7.86 million. Meaning, by police-barangay records, 7.86 million out of 22.3 million families directly are affected by drugs.

That’s one in every three Filipino families. Tragic, Duterte reminds, as addicts steal from the family, incestuously rape, and terrorize neighborhoods yet remain unindicted.

What to do with the 7.86 million addicts? Addiction is a medical problem, to be solved by rehabilitation. The cost is prohibitive. At the barest P36,000 to detox, medicate, and counsel one addict for a year, a budget of P283 billion would be needed to treat all 7.86 million druggies. That’s three times the Dept. of Health’s entire operating budget for 2017. Not yet included is the cost of erecting the rehab clinics.

The DOH’s total 2017 allocation for drug rehab is P2 billion. That’s already a big jump from the zero that the previous administration allotted for 2016. But P2 billion allocated for 2017, compared to the P283 billion needed to rehab all addicts, is a drop in the bucket.

Duterte fumes every time he discusses the drug problem. Getting the money for rehab is impossible. Much easier for him to say he’d be happy to slaughter three million addicts – a hyperbole, his spokesmen claimed. Last week he allotted, from Pagcor, P1 billion more for rehab. He did so grudgingly, he said, for it would have been better spent for the poor while killing off the incurable addicts – supposedly another hyperbole.

Eighty-five percent of us Filipinos approve of Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, the surveys show. We cheer that the killing of 6,200 suspected pushers, by cops and vigilantes, has rid our neighborhoods of muggers and porch climbers. By our silence we accept Duterte’s hyperboles about finishing off as well all 7.86 million addicts that afflict one in three Filipino families.

Duterte’s spokesmen advise us to be creative in interpreting his words. It’s easy to imagine the scenario if all the addicts are killed. We’d be walking down our neighborhood where every third household would be grieving the death of a loved one in the bloody drug war. Do we want that? Eighty-five percent of us do, surveys say.

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