Prospects or prison: A young person’s brush with the law

It was in 1999-2000 when hip-hop got more and more popular in Poland. While listening to Polish rap music, I wondered what rappers meant by ‘smoking weed’ or ‘rolling a spliff’. When I was 13, I had my first opportunity to understand. Older school mates asked me If I wanted to “smoke some weed” before classes. Since it was a public holiday, we did not have regular lessons, except for a principal’s speech and a trip to a museum. I decided to abscond, and tried weed for the first time.

We didn’t really know how much to smoke, so we all took too much of it and felt sick. It wasn’t very pleasant, but the next day I was very happy to be a ‘fully-fledged member’ of hip-hop culture. I hadn’t really enjoyed smoking cannabis, so after my initiation I barely took any. At that time, Poland had quite soft laws on drugs, so if you possessed less than three grams of cannabis you could not get arrested or even be given a fine.

Things changed as I got older. Cannabis was commonly used by my peers and began to appear at every house party. Many of my friends started to smoke everyday so I started to smoke more often than I used to and to buy my own stuff. I spent one evening in the pub with my friends, playing snooker, drinking beer and smoking cannabis. We were going back home in the middle of the night and were waiting for the night bus. I saw a Metropolitan Guard (a type of police officer, but with a more limited mandate) car approaching us, so I hid my stuff behind the bus stop in case they wanted to see our IDs and search us (this is quite common in Poland). There were CCTV cameras above the bus stop, so my action was immediately spotted by the camera operator who told the Metropolitan Guards about “something suspicious hidden” next to us. They found my stuff after a few seconds and called the regular police to search us (Metropolitan Guards don’t have the right to do so). At the beginning, I refused to admit that the stuff was mine, but when the officer showed me the CCTV above my head, I admitted it and hoped that they would be nice enough to release me.

But they didn’t. I was taken to the police station where I made a testimony, and was then transported to another police station outside Warsaw (on Friday nights, all jails in Warsaw are usually full of people who have been involved in pub-fights). I spent the night in a cell and the following

morning, a police officer took me to my house to search for drugs. My father was waiting there, he wasn’t very happy about this, but it could have been much worse. After the search, I was taken back to the police station. After spending another night in custody, I was taken to court. The whole case was dealt with in ten minutes. I had a very nice judge so I just had to sign a contract where I promised not to use any illicit substances for the next two years. This only happened because I had admitted the possession of controlled substances and my parents had hired quite a good lawyer.

Usually, such cases end up with suspended sentences, which is very problematic for the sentenced man because it’s hard to find a job without a “good behaviour certificate”.

This story is taken from a new joint publication between TalkingDrugs and IDPC looking at young people's experience of current systems of drug control.

PDF download: 

idpc_magazine.pdf