Albania punishes importing or selling marijuana without permission

In 1928 the Penal Code of the Albanian Kingdom made bringing in or selling marijuana without government permission punishable by one month to one year in prison plus a fine of 100 to 1,000 gold francs.^[1] Opium, morphine and cocaine stood beside it in the same article — narcotics entered Albanian criminal law as a western import, in a code consciously modelled on western ones.^[1]

A law without users

For over sixty years the law punished supply into a country that barely used drugs.^[1] The first narcotics users appeared only in the 1990s, after the massive emigration of the younger generation and the opening of Albanian society to the West created both demand and a market.^[1] Until then article 358 and its successors guarded gates nobody was pushing through.^[1]

The ladder grows

Each new code raised the stakes.^[1] The 1952 code punished possessing narcotics for sale and trading without a licence with corrective work or up to a year in prison, and habitual offending with up to three years.^[1] The 1977 code’s article 134 punished preparing, possessing or selling narcotics without permission with re-education through labour or up to ten years.^[1] The 1995 code split the field into four provisions — production and sale, cultivation of narcotic plants, production equipment, and promotion of use — and today’s code holds thirteen narcotics articles, with selling, transport and possession drawing five to ten years, seven to fifteen in complicity or on repeat, and ten to twenty for organising the trade.^[1]

One mercy survived the escalation: keepers of small doses for personal use are excluded from criminal liability, a line the High Court tested in 2008 when it convicted E.Z., a heroin user of at least four years, found with 1.9 grams of powder in September 2005 — guilty, but within a system that at least names the personal-use boundary.^[1] The paper that traces this ladder asks whether the severe sentences for personal possession deter at all, doubting that severity alone does the work.^[1] From a kingdom’s one-year misdemeanour to a republic’s fifteen-year felonies, the 1928 article remains the recorded start of Albania’s cannabis prohibition.^[1]