Croatia makes possession of drugs a crime

Until 1996 a person in Croatia who merely had drugs on them, with no intent to sell, committed no crime. That changed on 20 April 1996, and the change lasted until the end of 2012. A paper by a judge of the Supreme Court, written in 2003, lays out the sequence and what it did to the courts.

Before 1996: only the trade

The criminal code that independent Croatia took over from Yugoslavia had one drug offence, “unauthorised production of and trade in narcotic drugs”. It punished whoever produced, processed, sold or offered drugs, or bought, held or carried them in order to sell. Holding drugs for one’s own use was not in it.

The amendment of 1996

An act amending the code came into force on 20 April 1996. It renamed the offence “abuse of narcotic drugs” and put a new paragraph first:

	Offence	Penalty
Paragraph 1	Possessing drugs without authorisation	A fine or up to one year in prison
Paragraph 2	Producing, selling, or holding for sale	One to ten years

The new Criminal Code that took effect on 1 January 1998 carried both paragraphs over as Article 173. From 30 December 2000 the maximum for dealing rose to twelve years.

What the courts saw

Between 1998 and 2002 final convictions for drug offences almost tripled, from 1,041 a year to 2,957. Their share of all convictions in Croatia rose from 8.5% to 15.5%.

Most of that was the new paragraph. Of 11,298 proceedings completed in those five years under Article 173, 8,720 were for simple possession: 77%. Dealing accounted for 14%.

The repeal that did not last

In July 2003 parliament passed a large amendment to the code, due to apply from 1 December. It limited the first paragraph to possession “for sale or other putting into circulation”. The judge wrote that this decriminalised possession “for one’s own needs”, as the debate had called it, and restored the position that had held until 20 April 1996. He expected the number of cases to fall sharply.

It did not happen. The Constitutional Court repealed the whole amending act of 2003. Possession remained a crime.

Why the index moved

The index scores possession and enforcement by what happens to a person found with a small amount. Before the 1996 amendment the criminal law did not reach that person; afterwards it did, with up to a year in prison, so Croatia’s possession, enforcement and consumption scores fall at this date. They recover on 1 January 2013, when possession for personal use became a misdemeanour punished with a fine. The 2003 attempt is in the history as context only, because it never changed what the courts did.^[1][2]