Overcoming and Penalizing Precarity: Narratives of Drug Personalities Arrested in the Philippine War on Drugs

2022 ◽  
pp. 089692052110702
Author(s):  
Filomin C. Gutierrez
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
Trade Liberalization ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Productive Work ◽  
Authoritarian Populism ◽  
Metro Manila

The article problematizes state penality as a mechanism of repression of precarious workers through a war on drugs in the Philippines. The narratives of 27 arrested ‘drug personalities’ in Metro Manila tell of how methamphetamine energizes bodies and motivates minds for productive work. Bidding to be classified as willing and able workers and family men, the study’s participants orient to a moral stratification that pits the ‘moral versus immoral’ and the ‘hardworking versus lazy’. Qualifying their drug use as strategic and calculated, they uphold the neoliberal values of individual choice and accountability. Their support for the anti-drug campaign stems from their recognition of a drug problem and the socioemotional toll of the dysfunctions of living in the slums. While trade liberalization facilitates methamphetamine inflow, a war on drugs fuels an authoritarian populism. As the state reaffirms symbolic mission to protect its citizens, it blames precarity to a problem population.

scholarly journals Visions of Peace Amidst a Human Rights Crisis: War on Drugs in Colombia and the Philippines

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvador Santino F Regilme
Keyword(s):  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Illegal Drug ◽  
Public Health Approach ◽  
Illegal Drugs ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
State Repression ◽  
The Core ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Local Discourses

Abstract Peace is one of most widely used yet highly contested concepts in contemporary politics. What constitutes peace? That broad analytic inquiry motivates this article, which focuses on the contentious discourses of peace within a society besieged by widespread trafficking and use of illegal drugs. Focusing on the illegal drug problem in Colombia and the Philippines, the central puzzle of this paper constitutes two fundamental questions: How do state leaders justify their respective “war on drugs”? How do they construct and discursively articulate ideals of peace in the context of the illegal drug problem? This paper compares the post-9/11 Colombian war on drugs (2002–2010) vis-à-vis the Philippine war on drugs under the Duterte administration (2016–2019), particularly in terms of how their presidential administrations articulate “peace” in the context of resolving the drug problem. The paper examines the varying discourses of peace, investigates how those local discourses relate to global discourses on peace and illegal drugs, and underscores how and under which conditions those peace discourses portray the material distributive conflicts in those societies. The core argument states that the Uribe and Duterte administrations primarily deployed the notion of peace as a justificatory discourse for increased state repression, intensified criminalization of the drug problem, and the reluctance of the state in embracing a public health approach to the proliferation of illegal drugs.

Ambiguous fear in the war on drugs: A reconfiguration of social and moral orders in the Philippines

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-24
Author(s):  
Anna Bræmer Warburg ◽  
Steffen Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Discourses

This article explores the social and moral implications of Duterte's war on drugs in a poor, urban neighbourhood in Manila, the Philippines. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, surveys, and human rights interventions, the article sheds light on policing practices, social relations, and moral discourses by examining central perspectives of the state police implementing the drug war, of local policing actors engaging with informal policing structures, and of residents dealing with everyday insecurities. It argues that the drug war has produced a climate of ambiguous fear on the ground, which has reconfigured and destabilised social relations between residents and the state as well as among residents. Furthermore, this has led to a number of subordinate moral discourses — centred on social justice, family, and religion — with divergent perceptions on the drug war and the extent to which violence is deemed legitimate.

scholarly journals Rafael Lerma’s Photojournalistic Take on the Duterte Administration’s Drug War: A Counter-Barthesian Semiological Study

Plaridel ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-110
Author(s):  
Feorillo A. Demeterio III,
Keyword(s):  
Early Phase ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Iconic Image ◽  
National Police

Rafael Lerma is an award-winning and outspoken Filipino photojournalist who works for the broadsheet The Philippine Daily Inquirer. When President Rodrigo Duterte took office on 01 July 2016 and started to implement his campaign promise to mount a thorough war on drugs, Lerma became one of the photojournalists who consistently documented the grisly track of the said war. His most iconic image—that of a dead pedicab driver being cradled by his grief-stricken widow—did not escape the rambling speech of the President himself during the latter’s first State of the Nation Address. This paper culls 25 of Lerma’s most famous images related to the Duterte administration’s drug war. From these 25 images, six recurrent sociocultural icons have been identified: 1) poverty; 2) the dehumanization/demonization of the casualties; 3) religion; 4) the weakness of governance in the Philippines; 5) Operation Plan Tokhang conducted by the Philippine National Police; and 6) the state and the nation. By subjecting these visual sociocultural icons to an inverted version of the semiology of the early phase of the French philosopher and cultural critic Roland Barthes, the researcher textually explores Lerma’s take on the said war. Furthermore, this paper theoretically tests the capacity of Barthes’ semiology to tackle not only ideological discourses that are tucked beneath some sociocultural icons but more so counter-ideological discourses that are launched by the less privileged sectors of society.

US Drug Policy and Perpetual War against the Drug Trade in Mexico

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 237-255
Author(s):  
Alberto Omar Luna-Monsivais ◽  
Marcelo del Castillo-Mussot ◽  
Alfredo de la Lama García ◽  
Jorge Antonio Montemayor Aldrete
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Illicit Drug ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
Drug Trade ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Us ◽  
Perpetual War

Abstract Globalization of drug consumption has generated a highly lucrative market for illegal traffickers. The US launched a worldwide campaign against illicit drug use, forcing many countries to comply with the ‘War on Drugs.’ We describe this historical process as a perpetual war resulting in violence, criminality, forced displacement, and disappearances in Mexico and other countries. For instance, despite economic, political, and military coercion in Mexico, the “drug problem” shows little sign of going away, unless a new approach regarding drug production and trade is adopted.

Drug Education: Some Impressions from Experiences in Illinois

1971 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Colby Swanson
Keyword(s):  
Drug Abuse ◽  
Drug Use ◽  
Community Action ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
The State ◽  
Effective Drug ◽  
Drug Education ◽  
Training Workshop ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Factual Content

The concept of training workshop dominates the approach of the State of Illinois to drug education, although programs of many modalities are currently operating within that state. The factual content of drug education and its associated vocabularies can tempt an educator to label himself an “expert” on drugs. Facts, while indispensable to effective drug education, are 1) scarce, and 2) only part of the education associated with drugs. Drug abuse is often symptomatic of other problems. Young and old may tend to make more of the “issue” of drugs than a pseudoscientific controversy. Simplistic models of drug use and abuse cannot explain all drug taking behavior, nor can they fully contain implications for changing adverse drug taking behavior. Insofar as education is a science, it is an applied science. We should move rapidly beyond creating “awareness” of the drug problem and begin to equip people with community action skills.

scholarly journals The Philippine Sex Workers Collective: Struggling to be heard, not saved

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Sharmila Parmanand
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Structural Configuration ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Legal Remedies ◽  
Outreach Work ◽  
Metro Manila

The Philippine Sex Workers Collective is an organisation of current and former sex workers who reject the criminalisation of sex work and the dominant portrayal of sex workers as victims. Based on my interviews with leaders of the Collective and fifty other sex workers in Metro Manila, I argue in this paper that a range of contextual constraints limits the ability of Filipino sex workers to effectively organise and lobby for their rights. For example, the Collective cannot legally register because of the criminalisation of sex work, and this impacts their ability to access funding and recruit members. The structural configuration of the Philippines’ Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking incentivises civil society organisations to adhere to a unified position on sex work as violence against women. The stigma against sex work in a predominantly Catholic country is another constraint. Recently, President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has been weaponised by some members of the police to harass sex workers. Finally, I reflect on strategies the Collective could adopt to navigate the limited space they have for representation, such as crucial partnerships, outreach work, and legal remedies.

The State of Shared Prosperity in the Philippines

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Garcia ◽  
Jamil Paolo Francisco ◽  
Christopher Ed Caboverde
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
The State

Courting Migrants

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Burgess
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Feedback Loops ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Qualitative Comparison ◽  
Integrative Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration

This book examines state–migrant relations in four countries with a long history of migration, regime change, and democratic fragility: Turkey, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the Philippines. It uses these cases to develop an integrative theory of the interaction between “diaspora-making” by states and “state-making” by diasporas. Specifically, it tackles three questions: (1) Under what conditions and in what ways do states alter the boundaries of political membership to reach out to migrants and thereby “make” diasporas? (2) How do these migrants respond? (3) To what extent does their response, in turn, transform the state? Through historical case narratives and qualitative comparison, the book traces the feedback loops among migrant profiles, state strategies of diaspora-making, party transnationalization, and channels of migrant engagement in politics back home. The analysis reveals that most migrants follow the pathways established by the state and thereby act as “loyal” diasporas but with important deviations that push states to alter rules and institutions.

Crack and Criminal Justice in Canton, Ohio, 1987–1999: “The Drug Problem has Created a Monster”

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-182
Author(s):  
WILL COOLEY
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Crack Cocaine ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The City

AbstractThe rise of crack cocaine in the late 1980s propelled the war on drugs. The experience of Canton, Ohio, shows how the response to crack solidified mass incarceration. A declining industrial city of 84,000 people in northeast Ohio with deep-seated racial divides, it was overwhelmed by aggressive, enterprising crack dealers from outside the city. In response, politicians and residents united behind the strategy of incessant arrests and drastic prison sentences. The law-enforcement offensive worsened conditions while pursuing African Americans at blatantly disproportionate rates, but few people engaged in reframing the drug problem. Instead, a punitive citizenry positioned punishment as the principal remedy. The emergency foreclosed on more comprehensive assessments of the city’s tribulations, while the criminal justice system emerged as the paramount institution.

scholarly journals Adolescent impulsiveness and use of alcohol and tobacco

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-382
Author(s):  
Mª del Carmen Pérez-Fuentes ◽  
José J. Gázquez ◽  
Mª del Mar Molero ◽  
Fernando Cardila ◽  
África Martos ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factor ◽  
Drug Use ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Intervention Program ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Demographic Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
The Relationship

Adolescence is characterized by premature experimentation with new experiences and sensations. These experiences sometimes include drugs, which even though legal and socially accepted, begin to have noticeable negative consequences to the adolescent’s development. In recent years, a decrease in use of tobacco by Spanish adolescents has been observed, but not in alcohol. One of the causes of initiation in drug use is impulsive personality or behavior. Thus the purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between impulsiveness and frequency of use of alcohol and tobacco in 822 students aged 13 to 18 years of age. The State Impulsivity Scale (SIS) and an ad hoc questionnaire on demographic characteristics and use of alcohol and tobacco were used for this. The results showed that students who stated they were users scored significantly higher on impulsivity. Thus detailed analysis of the profile of individuals with this risk factor could favor more adequate intervention program design.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document