A year of Duterte: The bodies pile up, but the price of drugs goes down [Warning: Graphic images]

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte took office on 30 June 2016, vowing to halt the drug abuse and lawlessness he saw as "symptoms of virulent social disease". Over the past year, his brutal war on drugs has resulted in thousands of deaths and mass imprisonments, yet the street price of crystal methamphetamine in Manila has fallen and surveys show Filipinos are as anxious as ever about crime.

The drug war's exact death toll is hotly disputed, with critics saying the toll is far above the 5,000 that police have identified as either drug-related killings, or suspects shot dead during police operations. Most victims are small-time users and dealers, while the masterminds behind the lucrative drug trade are largely unknown and at large, say critics of Duterte's ruthless methods.

If Duterte's strategy was working, then the laws of economics suggest the price of crystal meth, the highly addictive drug also known as 'shabu', should be rising as it becomes harder to find. But the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency's own data suggests the price of shabu in Manila has fallen over the past year.

Thanks to his campaign, government officials say, crime has dropped, thousands of drug dealers are behind bars, a million users have registered for treatment, and future generations of Filipinos are being protected from the scourge of drugs.

Critics, however, including human rights activists, lawyers and the country's influential Catholic church, dispute the authorities' claims of success. They say police have summarily executed drug suspects with impunity, terrorising poorer communities and exacerbating the very lawlessness they were meant to tackle.

"This president behaves as if he is above the law – that he is the law," wrote Amado Picardal, an outspoken Filipino priest, in a recent article for a Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines publication. "He has ignored the rule of law and human rights."

IBTimes UK looks back at a year of Philippines' President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs. (Warning: Many of the images in this gallery are very graphic.)

In the first 11 months of Duterte's rule, police say 3,155 suspects were shot dead in anti-drug operations. Critics maintain that many of them were summarily executed. Police say they have investigated a further 2,000 drug-related killings, and have yet to identify a motive in at least another 7,000 murders and homicides. Human rights monitors believe many of these victims were killed by undercover police or their paid vigilantes, a charge the police deny.