{"id":4586,"date":"2022-03-03T19:12:19","date_gmt":"2022-03-03T19:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabisnow.com\/?p=59006"},"modified":"2022-03-03T19:12:19","modified_gmt":"2022-03-03T19:12:19","slug":"cannabis-and-ukraine-what-russias-invasion-means","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/?p=4586","title":{"rendered":"Cannabis and Ukraine: What Russia\u2019s Invasion Means"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The long-feared storm has broken, following Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. For longtime observers of this part of the world, there\u2019s a certain inexorable logic to this grim moment. For at least a generation, relations between the two countries have been characterized by Russian fears that its smaller neighbor was getting too open, too democratic and too Westernized. This extends to space for alternative culture and cannabis use, as well. Even in Soviet times, the \u201cseed beneath the snow\u201d represented by underground hippie networks was especially strong in Ukraine. <\/p>\n

The process of cultural loosening that began with the Soviet collapse and Ukrainian independence in 1991 has greatly advanced since the Maidan Revolution<\/a> of 2014. In this popular upsurge, a months-long protest occupation of Kyiv\u2019s Maidan Square finally succeeded in ousting a corrupt and repressive Russia-aligned president. <\/p>\n

But this sparked the Russian backlash<\/a>. Moscow fomented a separatist movement in the eastern Donbas region, and unilaterally annexed the Crimean Peninsula. <\/p>\n

It remains to be seen how ambitious Putin\u2019s plans for Ukraine really are\u2014putting a puppet in power in Kyiv, or seizing the entire country and rebuilding the Russian empire. In any scenario, the recent advances for cultural freedom in Ukraine will be threatened\u2014including for cannabis. <\/p>\n

First Tentative Openings for Cannabis in Ukraine <\/strong><\/h4>\n

Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine had been approaching its first significant loosening of its cannabis laws. The Verkhovna Rada, the country\u2019s unicameral parliament, had been considering a bill on the legalization of medical marijuana. The bill was actually introduced by President Volodymyr Zelensky\u2019s Cabinet of Ministers, according to a January report on the official news agency UkrInform<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Mykhailo Radutskyi, MP from Zelensky\u2019s Servant of the People party and a member of the Rada Committee on Public Health, stated: \u201cThe government bill on the legalization of medical cannabis has already been published for discussion\u2026 I hope that the committee\u2019s members will support it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under the bill, importation and distribution of cannabis would be under the control of the National Police\u2014but it would allow use of actual herbaceous cannabis flower. Radutskyi expressed hope that the Rada would approve the bill in 2022.<\/p>\n

Ukraine took its first step in this direction last April, legalizing the use of certain cannabinoid-based pharmaceutical products for medical purposes. As the Kyiv Post<\/a> reported, a decree issued by the Cabinet of Ministers made legal use of the THC analogues dronabinol (marketed in the US as Marinol) and nabilone, and nabiximols, a THC-CBD extract designed to treat symptoms of multiple sclerosis.<\/p>\n

As an analysis on Lexology<\/a> makes clear, the decree left CBD extract in a slightly ambiguous area, as Ukrainian law bars extraction of cannabinoids but only actually prohibits sale or possession of THC. Therefore, imported pure CBD extract was technically legal\u2014and was already being marketed, with the tolerance of the authorities.<\/p>\n

The decree was part of an opening to medicinal cannabis by the administration of Zelensky, who was elected in April 2019. In late 2020, his office issued a study finding that some two million cancer patients in Ukraine could benefit from medical cannabis as a safer alternative to addictive painkillers. That October, the possibility of legalizing medical cannabis was put before the voters by Zelensky in a non-binding poll\u2014a part of Ukraine\u2019s burgeoning model of democracy based on citizen consultation. More than 60% of respondents supported legalization.<\/p>\n

Crimea and the Carpathians: Counterculture Havens <\/strong><\/h4>\n

A particularly bitter irony is that the Crimean Peninsula\u2014which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, in a prelude to the current drama\u2014had been a center of alternative culture for both Ukrainians and Russians, going all the way back to Soviet times.<\/p>\n

The Crimea, with its agreeable climate (by Russo-Ukrainian standards), was as natural as a regional hippie haven. While Crimea\u2019s Black Sea coast is now more famous for the Russian naval fleet based there, it also hosts numerous nude beaches that have long been a magnet for Ukrainian and Russian hippies and self-styled Slavic Rastafarians. <\/p>\n

Starting in 2007, \u201cFairy Town<\/a>\u201d festivals have been periodically held in areas of natural beauty in different parts of Ukraine, principally Crimea. These events, on the model of the Rainbow Gatherings<\/a> and Burning Man<\/a> in the US, are organized by a group called the Rainbow Academy, based in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and the local capital of the Crimea Autonomous Republic, Simferopol. <\/p>\n

Another such festival has been held every July since 1993 at the other end of Ukraine, high in the Carpathian Mountains, near the borders with Hungary and Slovakia. The Shipot Festival<\/a> is named after the scenic waterfall where the hippies, punks, drop-outs and weekend warriors convene, in Volovets district of Zakarpattia region.<\/p>\n

Ukraine\u2019s western city of Lviv was a center of the quasi-underground hippie subculture<\/a> in Soviet times. Starting in the 1970s, Soviet hippies organized back-to-nature gatherings in remote areas, where they could let their hair down away from the watchful eye of the authorities. These were coordinated through a network called Sistema<\/a>\u2014humorously, or ambitiously, posing itself as a counter-system to the ruling Soviet one. This strain of alternative culture has taken deeper hold in Ukraine in post-Soviet times than anywhere else in the ex-USSR.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile in Russia\u2026 <\/strong><\/h4>\n

While Ukraine has twice seen free elections and peaceful transfers of power since the Maidan Revolution, in Russia there has been a consolidation of increasingly autocratic power in the hands of Vladimir Putin\u2014who has ruled continuously as either president or prime minister since 1999. This consolidation has included a harsh crackdown on cannabis and other illegal drugs\u2014and often, cannabis prosecutions have been weaponized as a form of political repression.<\/p>\n

Some cases have made brief headlines in the West, because they concerned Westerners caught in the legal snare. In January, Russian authorities finally released details of a criminal case against a US teacher who has been jailed since his detention in Moscow last summer. Russia\u2019s Interior Ministry said that Marc Fogel, who was detained at Moscow\u2019s airport in August 2021, was accused of attempting to smuggle cannabis into the country in his luggage. <\/p>\n

As CBS<\/a> reported, Fogel was a teacher at Moscow\u2019s Anglo-American School and a former employee at the US Embassy who used cannabis medicinally and was enrolled in a medical marijuana program back in the States. A search of his baggage turned up a small quantity of cannabis oil and herbaceous flower. He was charged with trafficking of \u201cnarcotic substances on a large scale,\u201d and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.<\/p>\n

Moscow human rights activist Alexander Khurudzhi, speaking for Fogel, told Russia\u2019s Interfax news agency, \u201cHe claims he was unaware of Russia\u2019s ban on medical marijuana.\u201d <\/p>\n

In 2019 was the egregious case<\/a> of Naama Issachar, an American-Israeli woman popped at the Moscow airport with a small amount of cannabis while changing planes on her way home from a yoga retreat in India. Sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, she was pardoned by Putin in January 2020\u2014in what was widely assumed to be a quid pro quo <\/em>worked out with the government of Israel. <\/p>\n

That same month, Putin was invited to speak at an Israel event commemorating the liberation of the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II in 1945. Then Polish president Andrzej Duda boycotted the event<\/a> in protest, noting<\/a> that the revised version of history made official in Putin\u2019s Russia practically excized the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the 1939 deal in which the two dictators gobbled up Poland between them\u2014and plunged the world into war.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s decision to sacrifice Duda in favor of Putin was speculated to be a pay-off for the freeing of Issachar.<\/p>\n

Chechnya: Laboratory of Russia\u2019s Police State<\/strong><\/h4>\n

But there have also been plenty of Russians caught in the web. When the 2018 World Cup was hosted by Russia, there were calls for a boycott over rights abuses in the country. One notorious case<\/a>, drawing special ire from rights groups, was that of the leading human rights activist in the Russian Federation\u2019s southern republic of Chechnya\u2014who had been imprisoned on an almost certainly trumped up cannabis charge.<\/p>\n

Oyub Titiev, Chechnya head of the human rights group Memorial<\/a>, had been arrested on possession charges after a police search of his car that January, and faced years in prison. Even within the increasingly authoritarian Russia of Putin, Chechnya is a harshly closed place, with the republic\u2019s President Ramzan Kadyrov running what critics call a \u201ctotalitarian state within a state.\u201d Titiev\u2019s arrest came amid a draconian anti-drug crackdown in Chechnya, which was one of the things he\u2019d been protesting\u2014along with the internment of gay men in detention camps. <\/p>\n

At the time of his arrest, Human Rights Watch<\/a> called the charges against Titiev \u201cblatantly fabricated,\u201d and expressed fears for his safety\u2014noting the many threats and attacks on members of his organization. Titiev assumed leadership of the Chechen branch of Memorial after the 2009 abduction and assassination<\/a> of its then-leader, Natalia Estemirova.<\/p>\n

In 2017, horrific reports emerged from Chechnya that authorities were rounding up gays<\/a> in camps and subjecting them to torture\u2014the first time that kind of thing had happened in Europe since Nazi Germany. Soon the reign of terror was being extended to drug users<\/a> and small-time dealers, who began facing grisly abuses at the hands of Chechen security forces as part of the same ultra-puritanical campaign. Reports described the use electric shock to induce suspects to \u201cconfess.\u201d <\/p>\n

And, again, many such abuses were politically motivated. Human Rights Watch<\/a> charged: \u201cFraming people for drug crimes has become an increasingly frequent tactic used by Chechnya\u2019s authorities to punish and discredit their critics in the eyes of conservative Chechen society.\u201d<\/p>\n

In June 2019, Titiev received parole, which was welcomed by Amnesty International with reservations<\/a>: \u201cWe\u2019ve been calling for Oyub Titiev\u2019s immediate and unconditional release since his detention. The real agenda behind his criminal prosecution on trumped up charges was to stop a human rights defender from doing his lawful human rights work. In spite of overwhelming evidence that the case against him had been fabricated, the authorities in Chechnya crudely abused the justice system to convict an innocent man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Late last year, Memorial was ordered to disband<\/a> by the Russian courts, on the spurious grounds that it was acting as a \u201cforeign agent.\u201d This means the country\u2019s most prominent human rights monitor has been effectively eliminated.<\/p>\n

The police-state measures first implemented in Chechnya were soon applied across Russia. In October 2018, the International Drug Policy Consortium<\/a>, an international network of non-governmental organizations, submitted<\/a> a \u201cCivil Society Shadow Report\u201d to the United Nations, calling the global war on drugs a \u201cspectacular failure\u201d and urging the world\u2019s governments to reconsider it. The report, entitled Taking Stock: A Decade of Drug Policy<\/a>, especially called out Russia for using beatings and other torture methods to extract confessions or information from drug suspects. The report emphasized that the prohibition against such methods in the UN Convention Against Torture<\/a> is \u201cabsolute and non-derogable, even in time of public emergency.\u201d<\/p>\n

The neighboring ex-Soviet state of Belarus, Moscow\u2019s ally which is serving as a staging ground<\/a> for Russia\u2019s thrust into Ukraine from the north, is under an even more closed regime\u2014where cannabis and every other social freedom<\/a> is concerned. The country has been led by a single man, Alexander Lukashenko, since 1994\u2014and he has now established himself as an outright dictator. After blatantly stolen elections in August 2020, Belarus exploded into mass protests<\/a>. These were put down with such brutality that members of Lukashenko\u2019s security forces are facing charges of crimes against humanity<\/a> by German prosecutors.<\/p>\n

Russia has also been a leading voice on the world stage for hardline anti-drug and anti-cannabis policies.<\/p>\n

Russia and International Cannabis Policy<\/strong><\/h4>\n

At the December 2020 annual Vienna meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs<\/a>, the governing body of the UN Office on Drugs & Crime, voted<\/a> to strike cannabis from Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs<\/a>, the global treaty regulating drug control policy. Cannabis had been classed in Schedule IV for 59 years, alongside dangerous and highly addictive opiates such as heroin. With the reclassification, the Commission cleared the way<\/a> for official recognition of the medicinal and therapeutic potential of cannabis by the United Nations. Among the 25 voting against<\/a> were Russia, China, Pakistan, Brazil and Cuba\u2014all authoritarian regimes, not coincidentally. The one abstention was Ukraine.<\/p>\n

As the UN General Assembly met in New York in September 2018, US President Donald Trump issued<\/a> a \u201cGlobal Call\u201d to renew the war on drugs\u2014to the dismay of activists and dissenting nations who had been pushing for a reconsideration of a failed strategy that has caused untold and useless suffering in countries around the world. The Trump administration enlisted Russia and the Philippines as \u201cco-hosts\u201d of the initiative\u2014both countries with appalling human rights records, where drug enforcement merges seamlessly with political repression.<\/p>\n

Both Russia and Ukraine are major hemp producers. But, as the USDA<\/a> notes, both have extremely stringent regulations permitting only strains that produce close to zero THC\u2014more restrictive standards than either the 0.3% allowed under United States law or the 0.2% in the European Union.<\/p>\n

With the world potentially approaching the brink of the unthinkable, cannabis policy in Eastern Europe may seem like a small footnote to a staggeringly momentous situation. However, an examination of this question can shed light on the more general stakes for human freedom as Ukraine struggles for its very survival as an independent state. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The long-feared storm has broken, following Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. For longtime observers of this part of the world, there\u2019s a certain inexorable logic to this grim moment. For at least a generation, relations between the two countries have been characterized by Russian fears that its smaller neighbor was getting too open, too democratic and too Westernized. This extends to space for alternative culture and cannabis use, as well. Even in Soviet times, the \u201cseed beneath the snow\u201d represented by underground hippie networks was especially strong in Ukraine. The process of cultural loosening that began with the Soviet… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marijuana_information"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}