What is under-reported is that in the days before Duterte, drug use had been curtailed, but during the campaign of then mayor Duterte, drugs went from being the number eight concern to the number one. I often equate this with social media, because social media was very effectively used by then mayor Duterte and was actually weaponized after he became president.
Where are we today? Look, all of the specific numbers President Duterte has said have been inflated in terms of the number of people using drugs. The government then downscales numbers. I would say the key part that is difficult is to look at exactly how many people have been killed in this brutal drug war. In January 2017 the number the police gave was, I think, 7,200, and in plain view that was rolled back to 2,000. If you ask the Commission on Human Rights, they'll say that it's 28,000 or 27,000 as of December 2018, but you can see that last year alone the police rolled the number back to 5,000.
I would say we are caught in a battle for truth. It is a battle for facts that is global because of American social media companies, these platforms that prioritize the spread of lies over facts. Facts are really boring, and that notion has enabled this environment. The number of people killed: Who knows? That's the first casualty in our battle for facts.