Mr. President, I am a Romanian psychiatrist who has worked for the last twenty years at all institutional levels, projects and institutions dealing with the phenomenon of drugs (legal and illegal) and addiction in Romania. I worked at the National Mental Health Center of the Ministry of Health, coordinated the creation of 2 substitute treatment services for heroin-addicted patients at the “Prof. Doctor Al. Obregia” from Bucharest, I have worked directly with thousands of consumers both in street actions and in various outpatient and hospital treatment centers, public and private, I have written chapters in drug addiction treatment manuals that appeared in Romanian, I am accredited by the Ministry of Health Health has to train and has trained hundreds of medical professionals in the field of addiction prevention and treatment. From this position and with such professional experience, I consider it my right to write to you and publicly warn you that the 2 bills that have been approved by Parliament and are currently awaiting your signature, if they become law, will have disastrous consequences for public health and even public order in Romania. My initiative arises in the conditions when both I and my colleagues learned about these projects from the press, and in none of them we were consulted and our professional opinion was not asked!

2 bills are aimed at:

1. increasing prison terms and forcing judges to issue death sentences (the so-called May 2 law)

and accordingly,

2. creation of a national register, which would provide for the obligation to monitor convicts for five to ten years after serving their sentence.

In both cases, the target persons are “dealers”, the initiators, thus hoping to block the activities of drug distribution among the population. However, in both cases the law 143/2000 applies, an old law in which the term “dealer” is defined extremely imprecisely, namely: “Cultivating, producing, manufacturing, experimenting, extracting, preparing, transforming, offering, selling, selling, distributing, delivering under any ownership, forwarding, transporting, procuring, buying, storing or other transactions related to the circulation of dangerous drugs without a license“. Over time, we, medical professionals involved in this field, tried to convince the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other institutions that have the relevant powers in this field, of the need to clarify this term by introducing minimum quantities that would distinguish between the consumer and the seller. . On sorry, I didn’t succeed. Thus, today we find ourselves in a situation where 80% of the thousands of annual DIICOT catches are less than 5 grams of the substance. As the experience of other countries in this field shows, what Romanian law calls dealers are actually addicted users , often from the poor, who end up distributing small amounts of the substance to support their addiction, while each of the last 6 years has seen a new record of convictions for drug users, a 400% increase!

This is evidenced by these data The bills on your desk, Mr. Speaker, incentivize and advance the already existing policy of incarcerating drug users who will be declared dealers. This imprisonment will result in the status of an outcast in society, as currently only those convicted of sexual violence must be registered in the special register. Practically, drug users in Romania, most of whom are young and very young, will be excluded from society for a long time, maybe for life!

The police representatives themselves said that this register would actually make their work more difficult. I quote: “The Romanian police, through specialized structures, already have a database of those who sell drugs, if we come now and just duplicate the register, we are doing nothing but complicating the work of the police on the ground” (representative of the Sidepol trade union)

Another catastrophic consequence of such a punitive policy will be an increase in drug-related crime. Already now, as a result of the implemented policy, we can observe two extremely disturbing events. The first is the transition from classic drugs that are easy to detect to much more dangerous substances, but which have the advantage of being difficult to detect and also much cheaper (so-called ethnobotanical or new psychoactive substances). Thus, Romania is the only country in the European Union where the most consumed drug is ethnobotany, not cannabis!

Go to any village or town in this country, Mr. President, and you will see how people (parents, teachers, doctors, authorities) are overwhelmed by the explosion of ethnobotanical consumption. Addicted children and young people drop out of school, become homeless, end up in psychiatric hospitals due to psychotic crises, and often become violent. Last year, the Romanian Psychiatric Association called for ethnobotany to be declared a national emergency and for a special policy of prevention and treatment. This proliferation of ethnobotany is a direct result of the punitive policies that have been in place to date and will be enhanced, not diminished, by the introduction of the two bills now on your desk. The second alarming phenomenon is the proliferation of dealers. As an adaptation to increasingly strict laws, dealers are increasingly recruiting children who are not criminally responsible. Children who become consumers at an ever younger age. Children who, instead of a medical institution, will end up in prison for 1 gram of the substance.

From the experience of other countries with a drug phenomenon, it is well known that legislation that increases penalties has the opposite effect – increasing drug-related crime, increasing the dangers of drug use, and increasing drug-related morbidity and mortality.

Finally, I would like to draw attention to the last aspect. This month, Germany semi-legalized the use of cannabis, saying that German citizens are allowed to possess up to 25 grams of cannabis. Other European Union countries are moving toward similar decriminalization and legalization legislation. Official EU policy encourages investment in prevention and treatment rather than increasing prison terms for consumers. These draft laws not only separate us from the European direction in the field of anti-drug policy, from recommendations based on European and UN scientific data, but also put us in the company of such countries as Russia, the Philippines, or China.

In the document with motivation, which, according to the initiators, justifies the proposal to create the Register, it is stated: “To reduce consumption and its harmful effects, action must be taken against human trafficking“Mr. President, for twenty years, Romania has invested almost exclusively in anti-trafficking measures, and today we are here: more drugs, more dangerous, we have thousands of cases and convictions, most of them consumers. Please refrain from continuing this policy, which is ineffective at best and criminal at worst.

Finally:

• The May 2nd Law and the Law on the Register of Persons Convicted of Drug-related Crimes will mostly target drug users rather than big traffickers, and will mean new toughening of drug laws that are at odds with EU policy
• the catastrophic situation of the drug phenomenon in Romania precisely because of the promotion of this type of legislation during the last twenty years and, if passed, these laws will create the preconditions for even more serious problems with health and public order, i.e. the opposite of what the initiators expected

Allow me, Mr. President, to bring to your attention a number of proposals as alternatives to the projects currently awaiting your signature:

• Return of 2 draft laws to the Romanian Parliament with a proposal to define the persons covered by them to avoid a situation where addicted users end up serving hard years in prison and are subsequently ostracized, having a similar social status to rapists and pedophiles
• Amending Law 143/2000 on drug consumption and trafficking in line with European law by defining clear quantities to distinguish between consumers and dealers
• Recommending the transfer of the National Narcotics Agency to the Prime Minister’s Ministry of the Interior to be able to integrate medical and psychological activities that can only be properly carried out by civil servants
• A recommendation to include in any legislative proposal on medicines representatives of doctors and other health professionals, as well as consumers and their relatives, in accordance with all European customs regarding the processes of creating new laws
• Recommendation to study and align oneself with the European anti-narcotics policy in order not to risk being in a situation where Romania will become a paradise of ethnobotany, a country of crimes related to the so-called “war on drugs”
• Recommendation to the Ministry of Health to allocate a funding line for the development of prevention and treatment programs that are carried out by professionals and are effective on the basis of scientific evidence.

Best regards and hoping this message reaches you,

Dr. Yevhen Hrisku

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