According to the PDEA Marcos was never placed on a drug watch list

MANILA, Philippines: The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) on Monday said President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was never on the drug watchlist of the agency.

The statement was in reaction to the statement of former President Rodrigo Duterte that “when he was the mayor of Davao, he was shown evidence by PDEA that on the list, the name of the President was there.”

“Former President Duterte was mayor of Davao from 1988 to 1998; 2001 to 2010; then 2013 to 2016. PDEA, on the other hand, was activated on July 30, 2002. When PDEA was activated, it established its National Drug Information System or NDIS, which is still in existence today,” the agency said.

The NDIS is the intelligence database of all drug personalities, gathering inputs from counterparts in law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Pursuant to its mandate under Republic Act 9165, or The Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002, PDEA regularly conducts intelligence workshops in collaboration with other law enforcement agencies to update the NDIS.

“From its inception in 2002 and up to the present, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was never in our NDIS. It is worthwhile to note that when the former President took over in 2016, his administration came out with a list, which was then initially called the ‘narco-list, sometimes referred to as the Duterte list’, and upon continuing validation and revalidation, it became the Inter-Agency Drug Information Database or IDID. The name of President Marcos is also not on the said list,” the PDEA said.