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

Abstract

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.

Confronting the Philippines' war on drugs: A literature review

“…9 9 As emphasised by Lasco, methamphetamine use among poor Filipinos is incorrectly characterised as recreational use and more accurately described as a way of coping with long hours of working hard on low‐paying jobs (e.g., Gutierrez, 2023). Ethnographers found that drug users and small‐time dealers perceive drugs as a pragmatic choice in everyday economic lives of the unemployed and in precarious jobs among the urban poor (Jopson & Sakaran, 2020; Lasco, 2021).…”