Gideon Lasco, MD, PhD is a physician, medical anthropologist, and drug policy scholar based in Manila, Philippines. He is senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman's Department of Anthropology and fellow (from 2021) at University of Hong Kong's Centre for Criminology. Since 2011, he has been doing ethnographic and qualitative researches on drug issues in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and has used his research and writing to critique and challenge the drug wars in his country and region. He is editor of Drugs and Philippines Society (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2021), an edited volume which features critical perspectives on drug use and drug policy in the country, and author of the Asia chapter in the 2020 and 2022 editions of the Global State of Harm Reduction. For his research on the politics of drugs and drug wars in Asia, he received the inaugural Research Excellence Award from the International Society for the Society of Drug Policy (ISSDP) in 2022, and the follow year he was elected as Board Member of ISSDP.