Drug war lists 20,584 kids as ‘users, pushers’

By Vino Lucero,
Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism

The fresh wind blowing through the spacious rundown facility can make one feel relax, energized, or even nostalgic. But many of those who had taken temporary residence here had been constantly plotting to escape it – until recently.

“They tell me, ‘we no longer want to get out of here because of what we hear from TV,’” recounts resident psychologist Lucia Larracas. In fact, one former resident was killed in his community just a few weeks after his release from here. A current resident, meanwhile, has told Larracas that supposed vigilantes recently killed three of his friends back home. According to the boy, his friends’ lifeless bodies were found separately, but in the same manner: each hidden under a car.

This is Tanay Boystown — officially known as the National Training School for Boys (NTSB) – which houses minors in conflict with the law. Most of the residents here have a history of illicit-drug use, but youthful restlessness could also have been another factor in the urge of many to break free from the facility. These days, however, that urge has been overtaken by the fear of getting caught in the government’s anti-drug campaign and ending up dead.

The Boystown’s residents are apparently not the only minors thinking this way. Among the hundreds of thousands of people who have surrendered to authorities in President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s war against drugs, tens of thousands are minors, or those under the age of 18 years.

Drug pushers, too?

From July 1 to August 28, or roughly the first two months of President Duterte’s term in office, 20,584 minors have surrendered to local police offices, according to the Philippine National Police’s Women and Children Protection Center (WCPC). Surprisingly, nearly 30 percent of the minors who gave themselves up did not even have files with the police.

Some 65 percent or more than 13,000 had previous records with the police as “first-time offenders” while about eight percent or 1,595 were repeat offenders.

More than 98 percent of these minor surrenderees admitted to being drug users, while only 273 or 1.33 percent surrendered as drug pushers or sellers, and 66 (0.32 percent) as drug couriers or runners.

Of this total, 3,971 were children from Central Visayas. Northern Mindanao, meanwhile, has the second highest number of children drug surrenderees at 3,783. Zamboanga region came in far third with 2,196.

A quantum leap

This two-month tally of minor surrenderees is a quantum leap from comparative figures gathered by the PNP from 2010 until June 2016 and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA)’s record of rescued minors from anti-drug operations from 2011 to June 2016.

According to the PNP, the minors involved in illegal drugs during the 78-month period covering 2010 until June 2016 included 5,110 illegal drugs users and 371 “traders/sellers.”

Meanwhile, PDEA recorded a total of 889 rescued minors from anti-drug operations across the country during the 66 months running from 2011 to June 2016. Of this number, 383 were noted as drug possessors; 343 as drug pushers; and 92 as drug users; 40 as “visitors of a Drug Den”; eight as drug runners; seven as illegal drug cultivators; four as drug trade “cohort”; four as drug- den “maintainer”; three as drug trafficker; three as drug-den employees; and two as drug couriers.

Forty-six percent or 410 of the children were 17 years old at the time they were rescued. Among the youngest of the rescued during this period was a six-year-old alleged pusher, followed by a seven-year-old supposed drug runner, and another alleged pusher, aged nine. (pcij)