The Supreme Court refused to exclude poppy seeds from the list of drugs

The Supreme Court (SC) of the Russian Federation rejected the claim of Alexander Startsev and his mother Elena Antipenskaya, who demanded to change the lists of narcotic drugs approved by the government of the Russian Federation. Market trader Startsev demanded that confectionery poppy seeds be excluded from the list, for the sale of which, according to the plaintiff’s lawyers, he was sent to a pre-trial detention center on suspicion of drug trafficking. In 2019, Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova also proposed excluding edible poppy from the list of drugs.

Alexander Startsev and Elena Antipenskaya filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court in May 2023. The applicants appealed government resolutions No. 681 (on approval of the list of narcotic drugs) and No. 540 (on control measures for drugs containing “small quantities” of such drugs). The lawsuit demands that confectionery poppy and its seeds be removed from the lists. As lawyer Valery Shukhardin, representing the interests of the applicants, explained to the court, the contested norms allow law enforcement agencies to abuse their powers and open criminal cases against sellers of legal poppy, while the legislation has long been in need of correcting such legal gaps. Another representative, Viktor Gladyshev, in turn, told RAPSI that his client “kept a stall on the market,” but was accused “of distributing hard drugs.” From the words of the lawyers it followed that Mr. Startsev is now in a pre-trial detention center. Mr. Gladyshev made it clear that the logic of law enforcement officers boils down to the discovery of traces of opiates in poppy seeds: “But they are in any poppy seed. It is impossible to remove them from there, but there is an extremely meager amount of them there! It’s confusing.”

The applicants also demanded that Russian Government Decree No. 934, which approved the list of plants containing narcotic substances in 2010, be declared invalid. The list mentions “poppy (plant of the species Papaver somniferum L).” RIA Novosti points out that in order to qualify a criminal charge under Art. 228.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on the illegal sale of drugs on a “large scale” requires 10 plants, and on a “particularly large scale” – 200 plants.

Judge Vyacheslav Kirillov, after listening to the arguments, rejected the claim.

In 2014, we note that the Supreme Court considered an application to exclude “technical poppy” – poppy straw – from the mentioned list. Then businessman Roman Shilov, referring to international practice, tried to convince the highest authority that Russia had exceeded its authority by including straw in the list. But the Supreme Court refused the applicant.

High-profile criminal cases surrounding poppy trafficking have been initiated before. Thus, in 2012, the head of the Federal Drug Control Service, Viktor Ivanov, reported on the arrest of businessman Sergei Shilov: he was accused of importing drugs into the Russian Federation under the guise of edible poppy seeds. 185 tons of poppy were seized from warehouses, and Mr. Ivanov said that the businessman “provided the annual maintenance of 100 thousand drug addicts.” Mr. Shilov, in turn, assured that he sold poppy seeds only to legal entities, in particular to bakeries. As part of the case, expert Olga Zelenina from the Penza Research Institute of Agriculture was also accused, who gave an opinion that drugs cannot be obtained from imported poppy seeds. As a result, all defendants in the case were acquitted by the court.

Lawyer Arseny Levinson recalls that the case of Sergei Shilov and Olga Zelenina “contained thousands of volumes and went on for many years.” “But the legislative problems that made it possible to initiate and investigate this case for many years have not actually been resolved. Such criminal cases reappear from time to time,” says Mr. Levinson. According to him, modern research methods make it possible to detect morphine and codeine in minimal quantities in confectionery poppy seeds, which is what law enforcement agencies use when initiating cases, conducting test purchases from entrepreneurs.

In 2019, the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation, Tatyana Moskalkova, proposed removing poppy from the list of drugs. According to the Ombudsman, many citizens who did not pose a public danger suffered for its sale, including the heads of enterprises that sold legal poppy. Mr. Levinson complains that the Supreme Court in its decision actually “avoided solving the problem,” but hopes that in the reasoning part the court will nevertheless clarify: the circulation of confectionery poppy seeds does not contradict the law.

Alexander Voronov