Exclusion from criminal liability of possession of narcotics in small doses -Issues of judicial practice

• Pages: 110-117

Vol. 10 No. 3

November, 2024

Academic Journal of Business, Administration

Law and Social Sciences

110

E-ISSN 2410-8693

ISSN 2410-3918

Exclusion from criminal liability of possession of narcotics in small doses

-Issues of judicial practice

Ardit Mustafaj

Special Court of First Instance for Corruption and Organized Crime, Tirana, Albania

DOI: hps://doi.org/10.2478/ajbals-2024-0026

Abstract

Albania’s law excludes from criminal liability persons in cases of possession for per-

sonal use of small doses of narcotic and psychotropic substances. This maer has also

been addressed by the Albanian Supreme Court in its unifying criminal decisions.

Being aware of this exclusion, persons who possess narcotics and psychotropic sub-

stances pay aention to keeping with them only such small doses. This way they try

to escape the criminal prosecution, since in most cases they are users of narcotics and

psychotropic substances themselves. In this regard, there have often been diculties

and misinterpretations to hold these persons liable for this criminal oense. In this

paper, these situations are analyzed from the legal and judicial practice point of view,

reaching the relevant conclusions.

Keywords: narcotics substances, criminal liability, small dose, expert.

1. Indroduction

Article 283 of the Criminal Code provides the criminal oense “Production and sale

of narcotics”. In the rst paragraph of this provision is provided the criminal liability

of persons who sell, oer for sale, give or receive in any form, distribute, trade, trans-

port, send, deliver and keep narcotic and psychotropic substances, as well as seeds of

narcotic plants, in violation of the law or in excess of their content, except in cases of

personal use in small doses. In other words, those persons who possess narcotic and

psychotropic substances or seeds of narcotic plants in small quantities for personal

use are excluded from criminal liability.

The unifying criminal decision no. 1, dated 27.03.2008 of the Supreme Court has uni-

ed the judicial practice by determining that the user of narcotics, who does not keep

Research Article

© 2024 Ardit Mustafaj

This is an open access article licensed under the Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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