In jail for a joint: Inside Russia’s controversial war on drugs

Artyom had been minding his business, waiting for a friend near a metro station in Moscow’s lugubrious suburbs.

The Russian winter had already hung its evening shadow on the city, so the 26-year-old computer technician did not immediately notice the three officers who made their way from the underpass. By the time the men were in sight, it was already too late. Artyom, who had a joint in his top pocket, knew the encounter would not end well – they “never do”. So he ran.

Freedom ended a minute later with the embrace of a dozen policemen, a broken nose and a serious head injury.

Several months later, Artyom – not his real name – was charged under the infamous article 228 of Russia’s criminal code, and accused of possession of hard drugs. Prosecutors claimed his joint was not just marijuana and tobacco, but also contained synthetic cannabinoids. They applied for a prison sentence of three years, and given Russia’s 0.1 per cent acquittal rate, certainly expected to get it.

In the end, Artyom was lucky with the judge, who saw inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case and ordered a suspended sentence and no-travel order. But others are not so lucky. According to statistics seen by The Independent, almost half of the 102,217 guilty verdicts handed down by Russian courts in 2017 related to cannabis and related soft drugs. That year was not an exception.

At the heart of the hardline approach to soft drugs is Vladimir Putin’s vision of a healthy nation, and a populist zero-tolerance drugs policy that runs alongside it. In comments given in December, the Russian president summed up his thoughts simply enough. Drugs were “a path to the degradation of the nation,” he said.

Russia’s law enforcement, generally driven by less lofty aims, has used zero tolerance to push its own agenda and boost incomes.

Many of the sources that The Independent interviewed for this story were reluctant to go on record. Some had outstanding court cases they did not want to jeopardise. Others said they were afraid police would take retributive steps. But all spoke of a system that was increasingly out of control: at best failing to distinguish between possession and dealing; at worst engaged in outright fabrication.

Arseny Levinson, a lawyer who provides advice to victims of drugs-related prosecutions, says Russia’s war on soft drugs and its users has escalated since 2006. The clampdown has happened despite the backdrop of a supposed 2004 liberalisation in the law, which, in theory at least reduced punishments for possession of up to 6 grams of marijuana.

Law enforcement has tended to ignore the new directive, Levinson says. Either they report an exaggerated seizure, or simply fake reports to include synthetic cannabinoids, which command serious, multi-year jail sentences.

“It’s a classic story that we see time and time again,” he says. “Reports of a drug catch of 6.1, 6.3, 6.5 grams, all just over the minimum, and never much more. It’s a crooked system with official testing labs linked to the police, who are linked to the state investigator. Everyone is under one boss.”

Another ruse is to frame personal use as dealing, says Alexei Fedyarov, head of the legal department of the “Rus’ Sidyashchaya” (Russia behind bars) NGO.

In some cases police have prosecuted the crime of passing a joint from one friend to another, and this has ended in jail sentences, he says. In others, police have tried to manufacture “dealing” situations.

In one recent case, Fedyarov helped overturn four-year sentence handed down to a 20-year-old student.

Arseny Levinson, Russian lawyer

The student spent 16 months in jail despite “obvious” evidence of a stitch-up, Fedyarov says: “Police had arrested his friend for drug use, but they wanted a better result. So they tried to catch the dealer red-handed by buying drugs from him. Naturally, the dealer was suspicious and told them to send a courier. This was where they co-opted the victim-to-be. They asked him to courier over an envelope with cash to the dealer, and, naively, he agreed. He was handed a box in return.

“On the way back, he was picked up by the police and charged with being a drugs runner.”

Fedyarov, a former state prosecutor, says a culture of targets and strict subordination drove the “irrationality” of the system.

“You have to understand how things look from the point of view of a typical operative,” he says. “The basic salary they receive is usually miserly and it’s the bonuses that count. If an operative doesn’t hit his target at the end of the year, it isn’t that he isn’t able to buy a fur coat for the wife. He isn’t able to cover the cost of the new year’s party full stop. That kind of calculation guards against excessive honesty.”

That peoples’ lives were ruined in the process was simply viewed as “bad luck” for the individual concerned, he adds.

Those who fall under the full weight of the Russian legal system usually find themselves alone, and with little support to help them fight their case. Often, they end up destitute.

Before Russia's drug control system struck, chemist Olga Zelenina was working happily enough as the head of a chemical analysis laboratory in Bryansk, a small city in western Russia. It wasn’t the most lucrative job, she says, but it brought in a stable enough income, and she enjoyed a reasonable life by local standards.

Her life was upended in 2011 as a result of a case that came to be known as Russia's "poppyseed affair." The story began a year earlier, when the Federal Drugs Control Service intercepted a large shipment of poppy seeds destined for a local bakery. Unfortunately for all concerned, most especially for Sergei Shilov, the man who owned the bakery, it contained above the allowed levels of opiates. Opiate contamination is an occasional side-effect of harvesting, but on this occasion, it was something that Russian drugs control officers were also keen to prosecute.

With Shilov facing a serious sentence, he wrote to Zelenina to ask for an independent scientific opinion. The chemist concluded that it would be essentially be infeasible to produce drugs from edible poppy seeds — the concentrations were not high enough. Her assessment did not go down at the Drugs Control Service. The chemist soon found herself included in the dock, accused of “facilitating a criminal scheme”.

In 2012, the scientist was arrested and taken to Moscow, where she would spend 42 days in a detention centre. That, she says, was “an experience too painful to even joke about”. Unfortunately, it was not the end of her torment. She would be spend another six years pleading her innocence — in Moscow, several hundred miles from home and family, and without an income to support her.

“I went from minister to MP to judge to lawyer,” she recalls. “I really got the feeling that no one would listen to me.”

Zelenina, who finally cleared her name in December, says Russia desperately needs a root-and-branch rethink of its approach to drugs. The system needed to change to “focus on real criminality,” she suggests. Levinson agrees, but says there could be another reason why the police directs resources towards marginal cases.

“Law enforcement doesn’t always want to stand in the way of the drug mafia because in Russia the two are often closely linked,” he says. “So instead they go after the marginals, the drug users, the victims – because someone has to take the sentences.”

But Russia’s war on soft drugs and its users shows little sign of easing. For one, it remains popular. According to a poll conducted by the Levada Centre in 2015, three-quarters of Russians remain against the decriminalisation of soft drugs, and less than one in 10 are against the criminalisation of all drug use.

The sustainability of the system in the long term is another question.

“For the moment, the bosses think you have to jail drug users,” says Fedyarov. “But it in 10 years time, the wave of 20-year olds imprisoned now will start to be released – but as 30-year-olds without family, social networks, work or money. Where will they turn? To crime, of course. Maybe, then, finally, the penny will drop.”