Philippine Drug War Metrics

In business, the metrics you focus on and incentivize determine how the organization behaves. Are you looking at the end result or vanity metrics that may not actually make a difference?

In the Philippine drug war, what’s our measure of success? If it’s arrests and seizures, doesn’t that encourage our police to meet arrest quotas? Isn’t there something seriously wrong about the idea of needing to arrest X number of people per month to look successful?

Shouldn’t we be looking at real metrics like morbidity (illnesses), mortality (overdoses), and rates of abuse? The question is: are they going down using the current method?