Guinea separates personal drug use from trafficking in its drug ordinance

Guinea’s drug ordinance took effect on 10 April 1989 with a separate penalty for people using drugs or holding them for themselves. They faced two months to a year, a fine, or both, while cultivation and trafficking carried five to twenty years and a fine.

Military rule framed the new ordinance

General Lansana Conté signed the law after the Council of Ministers had been heard. Its preamble referred to the army’s takeover on 3 April 1984, the proclamation of the Second Republic and earlier decisions preserving or repealing laws.

Within that setting, the ordinance addressed narcotics and psychotropic drugs, meaning substances affecting the mind. It prohibited unauthorised cultivation, preparation, possession, purchase, sale, transport, import, export and use throughout the country.

The rules distinguished personal consumption from the broader drug trade. That distinction affected both the available punishments and the possibility of avoiding prosecution through treatment.

Personal users could receive a fine alone

Someone using drugs illicitly or holding them for personal use faced a fine of 20,000–500,000 Guinean francs, imprisonment for two months to a year, or both. The rule covered controlled substances and plants.

Cultivation, production, import, export and trafficking were subject to five to twenty years and a fine of 100,000–100 million francs. Helping another person use drugs, including providing premises, had its own two-to-ten-year range, a fine, or both.

The ordinance also excluded suspended sentences for the offences covered by its suspension restriction. Even where a fine alone was available, the law treated personal use as a criminal matter.

Completing treatment could stop prosecution

The prosecutor could direct someone who had used drugs to undergo detoxification or medical supervision. The ordinance provided for prosecution to be withheld after prescribed treatment was completed, with first-offence conditions and prosecutorial discretion in repeat cases.

Investigating judges, juvenile judges and trial courts could also require treatment, supervision and rehabilitation. Evading a treatment order was punishable under the personal-use penalty rule, with the possibility of doubling the punishment.

Treatment therefore offered a route away from prosecution while remaining tied to criminal-law obligations.

Later codes rewrote the penalties

The 1998 Penal Code raised the personal possession and use range to six months to two years, a fine, or both. It also gave ordinary production and trafficking an explicit fine-only alternative alongside a ten-to-twenty-year prison range.

The 2016 code later set a separate tier for small personal possession, purchase and growing. Across these changes, Guinea continued to distinguish people holding drugs for themselves from those producing or supplying them.^[1][2]