Duterte sacks DDB chief for contradicting gov't drug users count 

President Rodrigo Duterte on Wednesday said he has fired Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) chairman Benjamin Reyes for presenting numbers that contradicted the government's statistics on illegal drug users.

Upon his arrival from Russia, Duterte told reporters at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport that he sacked Reyes for saying that there are only 1.8 million drug addicts in the Philippines.

The number is way lower than the four million used by Duterte in justifying his war on drugs, which is criticized both locally and internationally for its high death toll.

"You're fired today. Get out of the service. You do not contradict your own government," Duterte said he told Reyes.

Duterte said it irked him that Reyes mentioned the 1.8 million figure in a recent forum in Manila that was attended by United Nations Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial Executions Agnes Callamard, a vocal critic of Duterte's drug war.

"And dala-dala ng babae was 1.8 [million] when I have been telling everybody, everything that there’s about four million drug addicts. And here comes a chairman..." Duterte said.

He noted that five years ago there were already three million drug addicts in the Philippines based on the figure given to them by former Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) chief Dionision Santiago.

Reyes, in the forum, said the 1.8-million number was based on the 2015 Nationwide Survey on the Nature and Extent of Drug Abuse in the Philippines released in September 2016. But he also said that it could also reach as high as three million.

In his presentation, he pointed out that the four million drug users figure comes from an intelligence report. —KBK, GMA News