Short answer. Yes. Section 29 makes planting evidence — placing a dangerous drug on a person to incriminate them — a distinct and extremely serious offence, whoever does it, including police. The section as enacted imposed the death penalty, but Republic Act No. 9346 (2006) abolished that, so life imprisonment applies in its place.
What the law says
found guilty of "planting" any dangerous drug and/or controlled precursor and essential chemical, regardless of quantity and purity
RA 9165, Section 29 — Planting Of Evidence. Read the full provision →
Planting is its own offence
Section 29 punishes any person found guilty of "planting" any dangerous drug and/or controlled precursor and essential chemical, regardless of quantity and purity. Planting means surreptitiously placing a drug or precursor on a person, or among their things, to make it appear they possess or are dealing it. The phrase regardless of quantity and purity means the offence is complete even where only a trace was planted — the smallness of the amount is no defence. It applies to any person, and police officers are expressly not exempt; the provision is aimed squarely at frame-ups by those in a position to stage them.
The penalty as it stands today
As enacted the section imposed the death penalty, a measure of how gravely the law regards a false incrimination that can send an innocent person to prison. That penalty can no longer be imposed. Republic Act No. 9346 (2006) abolished capital punishment, so life imprisonment applies in its place. The severity is deliberate: planting is treated as seriously as the very trafficking and possession offences it fabricates, because it corrupts the evidence the whole system relies on. Older texts that still print the death penalty for this section are reciting a punishment that has been overtaken.
How it relates to a frame-up defence
An allegation that drugs were planted does two things at once. It is a defence to the possession or sale charge the accused is facing, going to whether the item was ever truly theirs. And, if it is established, the planting is itself a crime committed by whoever staged it. Those are decided in separate proceedings, on their own evidence, and success in one does not automatically follow from the other. The chain-of-custody safeguards that surround a seizure exist partly to make planting harder to conceal, since they force a documented account of where the item came from.
What matters in practice, and next steps
Because the accused's own defence and any complaint for planting turn on the same facts — who handled the item, when, in whose presence, and how it was recorded — the seizure and custody documents are central to both. Allegations of planting are difficult and heavily fact-dependent, and they are easier to raise than to prove. Anyone raising or facing one should take advice early, while the inventory, photographs, witnesses and logbook entries are still available and memories are fresh, because these are the materials on which such a claim stands or falls.