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By Elison Elizaga

César Gaviria, the former President of Colombia, became a superstar in 2017 when President Rodrigo Duterte called him an idiot. But there were two others: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ernesto Zedillo, former presidents of Brazil and Mexico, respectively.

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Together, the three idiots announced that the drug war in their respective countries were flops. In an article published by the Los Angeles Times on March 11, 2016, two months before the Philippine election, they proclaimed, “Outdated drug policies around the world have resulted in soaring drug-related violence, overstretched criminal justice systems, runaway corruption and mangled democratic institutions.” (http://tinyurl.com/svkpbz9)

In 2013, a German moron named Philipp Dettmer founded Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell. Kurzgesagt, pronounced “kurzgesagt”, is a “German animation studio … The studio’s YouTube channel … discusses scientific, technological, political, philosophical and psychological subjects.” Kurzgesagt has 10.1 million subscribers.

On March 1, 2016, before the three idiots of Latin America released their opinion on the drug war, Kurzgesagt uploaded a six-minute video on YouTube called “Why the drug war is a huge failure”. The show has received 7.1 million views, and has been translated into 44 languages so far, including Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Spanish, and Filipino.” (http://tinyurl.com/h3esqg5)

Excerpt from the English subtitle: “… The War on Drugs is a huge failure, with devastating unintended consequences. It led to mass incarceration in the US; to corruption, political destabilization, and violence in Latin America, Asia, and Africa; to systemic human rights abuses across the world.

“It negatively affected the lives of millions of people. All of this while we waste billions of dollars every year only to create and fuel powerful drug cartels while the goal of the War on Drugs seems less achievable than ever: a world without drugs. How could this happen?”

Kurzgesagt animation is based on several research papers, such as “Nixon on the war on drugs”: http://bit.ly/1QRJcZ7, “The Balloon Effect explained”: http://bit.ly/1SfnP3b, “The Economics Behind War on Drugs”: http://bit.ly/1VOJiPk, “Black Kids get more often arrested for drug offenses”: http://brook.gs/1ppiPH6 & http://bit.ly/1kJs83H, “World Drug Report”: http://bit.ly/1QY97NU, “Global supply of drugs”: http://bit.ly/1OLXq6u, and Four pillars [of] drug strategy”: http://bit.ly/1Qkhh0y.

The 162-page “The World Drug Report of 2015” was published by the imbeciles of the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC), a year before the Philippine election. (http://tinyurl.com/zdgxxuo).

The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) must have seen the UNODC report or at least the short video. But no one convinced Duterte to use these documents.

We know because, on Feb. 20, 2016, Duterte Harry vowed to end crime, including the illegal drug trade, in “three to six months”.  Repeat: Three to six months. For 7,500 islands.  Everyone knew no country had succeeded in stopping illegal drugs in such a short period, not even the US. The goal was suntok sa buwan.

But, hearing this political sales talk, and rallied by sex instructor Mocha Uson, millions of Duterte fans cheered. They were awestruck, mesmerized, spellbound. Flipping the pages of their Bibles, 7,000 fundamentalist pastors even compared Duterte to Moses and Nehemiah. Thank you, Cambridge Analytica.

After Duterte won the election, newly appointed Philippine National Police Director General Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa boarded a plane to Colombia to learn how to turn a drug war into a dead duck. He was clearly in the dark about Kurzgesagt, the UNODC report, and the three idiots. Bato left in September 2016 and returned to the Philippines that same month, when Duterte compared himself to Adolf Hitler and promised to kill three million drug addicts. During a presscon, Bato claimed he was impressed by the effective drug war in Colombia. In other words, after spending only a few days in Colombia, he discovered he knew better than César Gaviria.

Bato was also convinced he was more informed than Duterte and the certified bobo Vice President Leni Robredo. While Duterte has declared the drug war a fiasco, and Robredo has given it a grade of 1/100, Bato publicly disagrees. And reasonably so. Because Robredo is the fifth idiot.

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