Italy's top court keeps punishing users with more than a "modest quantity" like dealers

In October 1982 Italy’s Constitutional Court rejected a group of challenges to the 1975 drug law. For people who used cannabis, the outcome was that holding more than a “modest quantity”, an amount the law never defined, could still bring the same penalties as dealing, even if every gram was for themselves.

A law with an undefined line

The 1975 law had made buying or holding a modest quantity for personal use no longer punishable. Above that line, the law set the same penalties for holding a larger amount, whatever it was for, as for selling it. Between 1976 and 1980, courts in Rome, Cremona, Macerata and Rovereto asked the Constitutional Court whether this was fair.

Holding a stock counted as dealing

The courts in Cremona and Rome argued that it made no sense to punish a user like a dealer, when the whole law was built on treating the two differently. The Constitutional Court disagreed. A stock of drugs was dangerous in itself, it said, because the holder could always change their mind and sell it.

The judges pointed to a detail in the law that, in their view, proved the point: someone found to have already used up even a large amount on themselves was not punished. Once the drugs were gone, so was the danger.

Cannabis was not treated as milder

The Macerata court went further. An expert it had consulted found alcohol, above small doses, more harmful than cannabis, so punishing one and not the other looked irrational. The Constitutional Court replied that judging how harmful a drug is belongs to parliament unless the choice is plainly arbitrary. It was not, the court said, because the treaties Italy had signed listed cannabis among the drugs to be suppressed and punished. As for alcohol, parliament had reasonably chosen to punish only obvious drunkenness.

Small imports and the missing definition

A judge in Rovereto asked why importing a small amount was punished as heavily as importing a large one, when other drug offences were graded by quantity. The court answered that imports add to the drugs in the country, that Italy’s international agreements required every import to be punished, and that the wide sentencing range let judges fit the penalty to the case.

The Rome Court of Appeal’s challenge to the vague words “modest quantity” got no answer. It had not said what it wanted instead: freedom for personal use of any amount, or the harsher rules applied to small amounts too. The court therefore refused to rule on it.

What came next

The court repeated its view on small imports in 1988. In 1990 a new law ended the modest-quantity exception and made holding more than a fixed daily dose a crime, until a referendum in 1993 removed those criminal penalties. Today’s rules are on Italy’s country page.^[1][2]