Locsin: Step up war on drugs

MANILA, Philippines — Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. called for “more all-out” police operations against drug traffickers, after billions of pesos worth of smuggled “shabu” (crystal meth) and cocaine were intercepted recently.

Locsin said the government should not stop its war on drugs despite the outcry against police abuses and extrajudicial killings of mostly poor suspects.

“They won’t stop so we cannot stop our policy: We will exterminate the drug trade by any means efficient to achieve that purpose. A whole of nation approach of throwing everything at it (e.g. more all-out police operations),” he tweeted on Wednesday.

“Fuck critical drug-paid opinion,” he added.

Extent of drug trade

Locsin took President Duterte’s recent admission that the drug situation had “worsened” to mean that past administrations did not acknowledge the extent of the illegal drug trade in the country.

On March 15, Locsin defended the President’s war on drugs before the United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs in Vienna, Austria, saying abuses were no reason to stop the war on drugs but “rather they are calls to do it better.”

He said the campaign would continue despite “an international public relations war being waged against the war on drugs” and criticized European nongovernmental organizations for funding Philippine communist rebels.