In the mountain borderlands of the Cordillera, Philippine authorities dismantled a vast cannabis plantation on September 14 — thirty-six thousand plants reduced to ash across six thousand square meters of public land. The operation, coordinated across multiple agencies, erased an estimated seven point two million pesos worth of cultivated marijuana, yet the human story behind it remains unresolved: the cultivators were gone before the teams arrived, leaving only their harvest behind. It is a familiar tension in the long effort against illicit cultivation — the evidence destroyed, the architect