Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

Drug addicts, the laws on narcotics and their amendments

In our country the problem of the spread of narcotics and the multiplication of users is extremely acute, many of whom are fully dependent (ill - drug-dependent persons).

Parliament, attempting to respond to the demand to combat narcotics through the merciless pursuit of the “merchants of death”, enacted draconian laws through successive legislative acts. By Law 3459/2006, all earlier legislative regulations were renumbered (codified). The drug laws provide for devastating penalties, mainly for “dealers”, the most common being life imprisonment, which our courts impose without restraint. Because of the severity of the penalties and the court practice of systematically imposing (by the competent felony courts of appeal), on the just and unjust alike and mainly on the socially and racially weak (: the young, the economically powerless, the socially obscure and the “illegal immigrants”), life imprisonment, the prices of prohibited narcotic substances (soft and hard) have soared. The only ones prospering are the drug traffickers, who carefully hide, while the victims of narcotics are persecuted, characterized by the courts as “dealers” and destroyed, instead of being sent to appropriate treatment centers. Compared with the other countries of the European Union, the courts of our country impose gigantic sentences on defendants accused of involvement in the movement and trade of illegal narcotic substances, without any individualization of the sentence, so that it may serve as a means of correction and improvement of the offender and not as a measure of revenge and destruction. For example, while the Court of Appeal of Rome imposed a five-year sentence on Greeks accused of transporting narcotic substances (hashish) within Italian territorial waters, the Three-Member Court of Appeal of Athens imposed, for the same act and on the same defendants, taking into account the conviction of the Court of Appeal of Rome, the sentence of life imprisonment; subsequently, the Five-Member Court of Appeal of Athens reduced the sentence to twelve years (the Supreme Court dealt with the matter also in decision no. 1/2011 of its Plenary Session, applying the Treaty of Lisbon, and quashed the second conviction decision of the Court of Appeal of Athens). There are countless examples of convictions to devastating and inhuman sentences, even of innocent persons (because judges are not gods and therefore also make mistakes, as the president of the Supreme Court stated), who were acquitted after applying to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), as happened in the case of Konstantinos Pyrgiotakis (who had been irrevocably convicted despite the acquittal proposals of the prosecutors and, in the end, was acquitted after a judgment of the ECtHR was issued and after he had remained in prison for four and a half years). Among the many cases of excessive and unjust sentences (apart from convictions of innocent persons, through the reverse application of the fundamental procedural principle and principle of law according to which “in case of doubt, the court is required to acquit the defendant”) are convictions to life imprisonment of young people because their relatives had been drug addicts and they did not wish to inform on them; convictions to life imprisonment of persons who had never been involved with drugs throughout their lives and at some point offended, around the age of fifty or close to it. Other convictions to decades of imprisonment (as well as life sentences) of persons in whose hands or possession not even a trace of a narcotic substance was found, but movement or trade was inferred from other evidence without becoming indisputable. The conviction to life imprisonment of others although they were able to prove that they were successful entrepreneurs and that it was not logical for them to have involvement in drug trafficking. The cases of such convictions are truly countless. Yet neither through convictions to inhuman penalties of the just and unjust, guilty and innocent alike, was the trade and movement of narcotics reduced and, as one of the politicians of the left (Fotis Kouvelis) recently and correctly observed, this particular strict legislation did not contribute to improving the situation, nor even minimally to solving the drug problem. Due to the increase in the number of drug-dependent persons, the increase in deaths from drugs, the increase in prosecutions for drugs, the increase in prisoners and pre-trial detainees for drugs (statistically, Greece has the most prisoners and pre-trial detainees), and the corresponding decrease in the effectiveness of measures, criminal, correctional and therapeutic, the decision to decriminalize drug use or its prosecution as a petty offence appears to be a positive development (if combined also with other reforms and the required rationalization of penalties). Consequently, the reactions of most political parties and of various incompetent and competent persons through denunciations and slogans do not reveal a genuine interest in combating the spread and trade of narcotics. They are attributed to purely demagogic purposes, which we have become accustomed to enduring in the hope that someday this situation will change, when the mentality and educational level of the majority of citizens changes and when our politicians stop demagoguing and bend with interest over the solution of serious social problems, one of the most serious of which is the drug problem.