Human Writes: We have lost the war on drugs

Imagine a disease that causes almost half a million deaths a year, that has children losing parents, that triggers boundless crime and violence. Surely we’d scramble for solutions. Surely global bodies would not trot out the same useless strategies for years. Surely no leader would call to kill those affected. That, though, is the reality of the global drug epidemic.

In Manila, blood-stained bodies of alleged suspects are found daily on the streets, the result of extrajudicial killings by vigilantes or the police. Often, the faces of the murdered are wrapped in plastic tape, their hands tied, with a note – or sick meme. In one case, a grinning mouth and eyes were drawn over the wrapped face of a dead man.