Drug use itself becomes an offence in Soviet Lithuania

In June 1987, using drugs became punishable across the Soviet Union — including in Lithuania. A 22 June decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet made illicit drug use a misdemeanour, and a second case within a year a crime carrying up to two years’ imprisonment or corrective labour.^[1]

Thirteen years after possession fell

Possession without intent to sell had already been a crime since the 1974 decree on reinforcing the fight against drug addiction, punishable by up to three years and copied into Article 224 of every republic’s penal code.^[2] That decree had also raised production and trafficking to ten to fifteen years and created offences of seducing another person into drugs and stealing narcotics.^[2] The 1987 decree closed the remaining gap: not just holding drugs, but consuming them.^[1][2] For Lithuania, still the Lithuanian SSR, it arrived as union law, needing no republic vote.^[1][2]

Treatment by compulsion

The decree belonged to the Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign era. Two years earlier, refusal of treatment or continued abuse alone had become enough to commit dependent people to labour-treatment clinics, the LTPs, where the regime resembled penal colonies and escapes were crimes.^[1] Proceedings there were simplified, rulings could not be appealed, and the legal position of the committed was worse than that of criminal defendants.^[1] A Leningrad advocates’ leader at the time called the steady escalation of penalties a sign the authorities had resigned themselves to never solving drug problems constructively and humanely.^[2]

Rejected three years later

The use offence did not survive the union. On 25 October 1990 the Committee for Constitutional Supervision declared criminal liability for illicit drug use unconstitutional, holding that isolating ill people who had committed no offence belonged in medical, not penal, institutions.^[1] Possession stayed criminal — in independent Lithuania as elsewhere — and the 2003 Criminal Code and the 2017 recriminalisation kept it so. Gorbachev himself eventually acknowledged a far larger drug problem than Soviet authorities had ever admitted, and addiction rates rose across the post-Soviet states after independence.^[2] Lithuania acceded to the Single Convention in its own right in 1994, closing the Soviet chapter. The Lithuania profile follows that line to the present.