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You've got it all wrong, Mike:  there should be no drug laws whatsoever...any/all drugs should be legal.

In fact, there should be no laws against anything.

Only then can we have civil peace.

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I only saw one photo where it even vaguely looked liked the person might have been actually holding a gun.  I assure you, the sight of a gun in a dead person's hand is rare.  Most folks taking mortal wounds will drop a weapon to instinctively try to hold wounds, crawl away, otherwise escape, etc.

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Like the guy with the new looking 1911?  LOL  There are a lot of legal and illegal guns in the Philippines but rumor is they're planting guns left and right.  


Another part of the story that isn't being reported is that a lot of the folks using drugs are simply looking for pain relief from illnesses that they can't afford to treat.  The Philippines have some of the most screwed up drug scheduling I've ever seen.  After Marcos they had basically no narcotic pain meds until the WHO more or less forced them to start getting them.  They have a two teared system instead of three or more like most places.  Schedule 1 is NSAIDs, aspirin, etc. then they jump to schedule 3 which includes morphine, meperidine (Demerol), some of the oxis, etc.  So they jump from regular OTC stuff to the really good stuff with nothing in between.  Prescribing Schedule 3s requires additional training and requirements which most physicians do not get- only 18% of physicians have the "yellow pads" to allow them to prescribe narcotics and benzos.  If it is thought that they are overprescribing they can face arrest and punishment up to and including the death penalty so most don’t want to bother with them.  Pain control is not really taught in nursing school here and the nurses do not understand it.  If you are a cancer patient and can afford the treatment and meds you still have to go to a pain management specialist who can only prescribe limited amounts of meds.  In a very poor country like the Philippines many folks can’t afford this so they use whatever they can get including crappy weed and some illegal stuff.

I’ll give you a story about how bad it is.  Last month I got hit by a car while riding my motorcycle.  I broke my humerus (comminuted fx of the proximal humerus above a couple of plates I already have) and partially dislocated the shoulder; anyone who’s ever had either can tell you how badly they hurt.  I call my roommate who takes me to one of the better hospitals in town and they want to give me oral ibuprofen until the ortho doc can come in sometime later that afternoon.  After begging and pleading they finally give me some Demerol- I’m a good 200lbs and they give me 50mg IV which takes the edge off so I don’t want to kill everyone in the room so I calm down.  I have to wait a couple of days for the swelling to go down so they can do surgery (another plate and screws).  They give me 50mg of Demerol IV every eight hours- normal adult IV dosage is 25-100mg every four hours.  Obviously I’m thrilled each time they finally bring me more.  They switch me to morphine IV but at only 5mg every eight hours, again normal staring dosage is 4-10mg every 3-4 hours for moderate to severe pain with smaller doses every couple of hours after pain is brought under control.  You can see that at their dosing regimen I never got the pain under control- they’d knock it down for a bit then it would build again whereas if they’d given me a loading dose to get it under control then they could have used smaller doses every 4hrs to keep it under control instead of me having breakthrough pain when it’d wear off and I had to wait on the next dose.  They added an NSAID in between the morphine doses but that did nothing that I could tell.  For take home pain meds I was told to get Tramadol, it’s basically OTC here I guess because it has no pleasurable side effects as near as I can tell.  It has a lot of not so fun side effects including dizziness, nausea, constipation, difficulty urinating, and screwed up sleep due to messing with serotonin levels.  While all narcotics can have these effects, some basic Tylenol 3s or 4s would probably work better but there is no codeine in this country, there is no Lortabs or Percocets or something more middle of the road nor do they have decent muscle relaxers like Soma or Flexeril.  Even if they did remember that only 18% of the doctors in the entire group of islands can prescribe them and if the narcotics folks think you are overprescribing or using them in manner that they don’t see as fit well now they can just kill you themselves under Duterte’s misguided thinking.  

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Lol Utah.  What a shocker

It's ok to fuck and marry numerous teenagers, but you are the devil if you use drugs

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Yeah. This won't end well.

I'd be a bit more sympathetic if this were over child prostitution or human trafficking.  

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What's happening in the PI makes Prohibition look like patty-cake.

An actual example of when the police really are indistinguishable from the "gangs".  

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It's the Philippines.

It's a 2A Mecca. Everyone makes or sells guns.

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I betcha they suffocate.

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It is actually pretty nice once you get out of Manila.   Filipinos tend to be red neck as hell.  They like fried food, guns, and 4x4's.  Awesome people.