The Parliament of Tatarstan proposed not to give punishment “below the lowest” for the sale of drugs

The State Council of Tatarstan and State Duma deputy from this republic Airat Farrakhov submitted to the State Duma bill tightening anti-drug laws. The document proposes to include article 228.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (illegal production, sale or transfer of narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances or their analogues) in the list of articles for which it is impossible to impose a sentence below the lower limit due to extenuating circumstances.

According to the deputies, the courts should not mitigate the punishment for selling drugs in relation to a certain category of the accused: pregnant women, mothers of large families, disabled people, minors.

The explanatory note to the bill says that now in correctional institutions of Tatarstan, out of the total number of convicts, 29% are serving sentences for drug crimes. At the same time, a year ago, their share was 23%. “Over the past two years, the number of fatal poisonings as a result of drug use has increased (2019 – 69 facts, 2020 – 115, 2021 – 181), most of which were produced in clandestine laboratories,” the note says.

Also, the authors of the bill point to “the tendency to reduce the very term of imprisonment imposed for the commission of crimes related to the production and sale of drugs.” In 2019, the average was 7.8 years, in 2020 – 7.6 years, and in the past – 7.4 years, according to the materials for the bill.

The bill received a negative response from the government of the Russian Federation. “Currently, the ban on imposing a milder punishment than provided for this crime applies to the most dangerous … An unreasonable expansion of the use of criminal repression measures will lead to a violation of the balance of the general principles of sentencing,” the recall says.

Kirill Antonov, Kazan