Chad's pharmacy law punishes group drug use and doubles grower penalties

Chad’s pharmacy law, signed on 24 November 2000, exposed people possessing narcotics without a legitimate reason or using them together to one to six years in prison, a fine, or both. It also punished helping someone else use drugs and doubled the penalties for illicit cultivation and manufacture.

Drug control extended beyond pharmacies

The law replaced earlier pharmacy legislation dating from 1965 and reorganised human and veterinary pharmacy. It adopted the narcotic and psychotropic drug lists in the international conventions Chad had ratified, bringing cannabis within its controlled-drug rules.

Chad already had a 1966 decree prohibiting cannabis possession, use, growing and trade, with exceptions for authorised scientific research. The new law combined regulation of medicines with offences reaching people outside the pharmacy profession.

Free help could bring punishment

Breaching narcotics regulations carried one to six years in prison and a fine of 300,000 to three million CFA francs, with either punishment also available alone. The same penalties covered attempts and agreements to commit those offences.

People using narcotics together faced that range, as did anyone helping another person use them. The law expressly covered help given free of charge, including providing premises. Someone carrying narcotics without a legitimate reason also faced the same penalties.

Helping others use drugs brought a further consequence: courts had to impose a residence restriction lasting five to twenty years. The rule therefore reached the person making a place available as well as those using drugs there.

Growing and supplying minors doubled the penalties

Illicit cultivation of plants containing narcotic active ingredients and illicit manufacture attracted double the ordinary penalties. This made the prison range two to twelve years, alongside the corresponding increase in fines.

The same doubling applied to supplying a minor or helping a minor use the substances. Courts could also confiscate drugs and, in the specified cases, equipment and furnishings associated with the offences. Professional bans could affect people whose work provided the setting for a violation.

Treatment could be compulsory

Judges could order drug users prosecuted for the listed offences into detoxification in a specialist institution. The government was to set the treatment conditions and rules for state funding by decree.

Avoiding a treatment order carried a separate six days to two months in prison and a fine. Those punishments were additional to the penalties for the underlying drug offences.

Chad later addressed confinement in its 2017 Penal Code, allowing up to two years in a health institution for some convicted people with drug dependence. Compulsory treatment remained part of Chad’s response to drug use alongside criminal punishment.^[1][2]