(Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte speaks at the presidential palace in Manila, January 24, 2017.Reuters/Czar Dancel)
During a speech at an event celebrating the 115th anniversary of the founding of the Philippine Bureau of Customs, President Rodrigo Duterte gave a customarily blunt response to an op-ed written by former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria.
Gaviria, who presided over the hunt for and killing of Pablo Escobar, cautioned against deploying armed police and troops to fight the drug trade and called for more efforts to address the social factors related to drug use in a New York Times op-ed titled "President Duterte is repeating my mistakes."
Duterte, whose campaign against the drug trade in the Philippines is believed to have led to more than 7,600 killings since he took office in summer 2016, gave little weight to Gaviria's words.
"To tell you frankly [they say that] Colombia [leader] has been lecturing me. That idiot," he said, according to Philippine news site Rappler.
During his speech, Duterte had been describing the virulence of "shabu," the local name for methamphetamine used in the Philippines.
According to Rappler, he said he had been "receiving so many lectures, communications, and criticisms" about his war on drugs. But, he said, observers should be more understanding, since he was dealing with around 4 million or 5 million addicts in the Philippines.
That number doesn't quite jibe with other estimates. Data from the President's Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) put the number of drug users at about 1.8 million, about half the 3.7 million that Duterte has cited in the past, according to Reuters.
(Nora Acielo, 47, lies dead after she was gunned down by unidentified men while she was escorting her two children to school in Manila, Philippines, December 8, 2016. Police said Acielo was among more than 30 people slain over the previous three days in drugs-related killings.REUTERS/Erik De Castro)
Of those 1.8 million, only about one-third had used drugs in the previous 13 months, and only 860,000 had used shabu. Overall, drug-usage rates in the Philippines are thought to be roughly similar to the US or Australia.
Duterte also contrasted the nature of Colombia's drug trade with that of his country, saying the dissimilarities necessitated a different approach in the Philippines.
"You know, they have cocaine there. Cocaine and heroine, not really; cocaine and marijuana are kind of okay. You can still communicate," he added. Colombia is the world's biggest producer of cocaine, and in the past, much of the heroin consumed in the US has come from South America as well.