Europe’s drug laws are a mess – and ordinary people pay the price

Cristian Dide knew that his politically motivated stunt of sending sealed packets of cannabis products he purchased legally to the Romanian prosecutor’s office would eventually trigger a response.

The whole point was to open a debate about what he describes as the absurdity, inconsistency and outdated nature of the patchwork of laws governing the sales and use of various cannabis products, both in shops and online in the EU and Romania.

What the 36-year-old activist and businessman did not expect was to be tracked down by security forces spying on him through his smartphone, dragged off a train in the middle of the night by Romania’s elite Directorate for Investigating Crime and Terrorism, and held in jail for 30 days, late last year. He’s now awaiting trial on charges of drug trafficking. He remains vocal and unbowed about the absurdity of Europe’s cannabis laws.

“The law is arbitrary,” he told me during an interview in a cannabis shop in Bucharest. “There are discrepancies in the way products are sold by Romanian businesses and European businesses and the way authorities are dealing with them. I am trying to force them to change the law or apply it equally. If they want to close all these shops, close all of them, or change the law.”

At the heart of the issue is ambiguity over what constitutes hemp products and marijuana, both of which belong to the cannabis family of plants. But the broader context is the public embrace of recreational marijuana use in the west that the law has yet to catch up to. This is leading to confusion, and in some cases, ruined lives.

While over the last decade, dozens of American states have severely relaxed laws on recreational marijuana use, the EU remains a laggard. So far, only the island nation of Malta has legalised recreational weed, with Germany and Luxembourg announcing plans to further relax rules on marijuana, and public pressure building to hold a referendum on legalisation in Italy.

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Jovial despite his legal troubles, Dide meets with me at a cafe that sells hemp products in downtown Bucharest. The shop, called Cannabis, Amsterdam, sells oils, candy bars, cookies and assortments of powders that are perfectly legal as long as they contain virtually no THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana that makes you high.

All across Europe, such wellness shops have sprung up on high streets and in shopping malls. But different nations have different laws on how little THC each product can contain, so if you buy something perfectly legal in one country, it might bring you a fine or arrest in a country just across the border in the same trading bloc.

Get caught with a small amount of weed in the Czech Republic, for example, and it’s no big deal. Go across the border to Slovakia, which used to be part of the same country for much of the 20th century, and you can do jail time.

For cannabis rights activists, resolving questions and ambiguities in the law isn’t just a way to find legal ways to get high. In fact, Dide says he has never smoked weed in his life. But he argues that the cracks in the law along with overzealous policing have destroyed people.

He describes a friend who was suffering from full-blown Aids, and was taking cannabis oil as a salve against the side effects of his medicine. He began growing his own supply, but was arrested by Romanian authorities and charged with trafficking.

There was no proof he ever sold anything in his life, but prosecutors surmised that the kilogram of cannabis he’d grown and kept at home just had to be for wider distribution, and a judge agreed, sentencing him to two years’ house arrest. They ignored his argument that a kilogram of weed was only enough to produce only 140ml of the oil he needed.

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Another Romanian, Alexandru-Claudiu Radulescu, took his own life last year while being prosecuted on a formidable charge of international drug trafficking for selling perfectly legal cannabis products he had bought from Switzerland. It was outrage over Radulescu’s death that prompted Dide to take action, he says.

“If a kid is found with half a joint, he’s taken before one of the highest prosecution offices in the country,” says Dide. “We’re talking about a problem of the rule of law.”

European governments refer to the 1961 United Nations convention on drugs which policymakers say dictates that nations impose criminal penalties for supplying drugs for non-medical purposes. But many say that guiding principle is grossly outdated, especially since more jurisdictions are relaxing laws. A study last month showed more than half of EU citizens support legalisation of recreational marijuana use.

Dide will appear before a judge on Thursday. His lawyer will argue that the prosecutor has violated his rights and that the case should be dismissed. If Dide’s prank was ill-advised – even if well-intentioned – he has already paid a steep price. In addition to being locked up for several weeks, he has spent the equivalent of about £14,000 on legal expenses. It is a huge personal price to pay for bringing up a matter that policymakers in Brussels, London and other capitals should be resolving on their own.