When Alexander Litreev was swept up for substances at the end of February, I published a post where I urged people to focus not so much on the specific case, but on the repeal of Article 228 itself. The suggestion was to hurry with pressuring the state through mass actions before the news cycle was replaced by something else. Alas, the news cycle was indeed replaced, and mass actions now can only occur as a result of state sabotage, as happened in the Moscow metro on the day the access system premiered.

So, while the country was gradually settling into home self-arrest, Litreev’s support group worked quietly for his release and succeeded: Alexander has been freed. But the direction of undermining state drug policy has not been forgotten, and today the Tea Club movement released a very good, detailed longread about how the state fights drugs and how it should be done.

I am aware that the Libertarian Party is on strained terms with the Tea Club, but in this particular case, I would consider it a major oversight on the part of the LP not to promote this article—even if it requires pulling it onto their own site and removing mentions of the TC and the signatures of all authors who are not party members. As Ekaterina Schulmann likes to repeat, for political success, one must unite around common interests, not common sympathies. So please, help your editorial board make the right decision.

It would also be great if Egor Zhukov forwarded the article to his recent interlocutor, Evgeny Roizman. In my February post, I naively stated that even within his cannibalistic logic, a drug user is not a criminal. Not by a long shot. On the air of Zhukov’s program “Conditionally Yours”, Roizman claimed exactly the opposite. He also indicated that he was completely unaware of the Portuguese experience—which the article describes.

Thanks to the coronavirus, another promising direction for pressuring the state has emerged. One can demand the full or partial repeal of Article 228, and one can also demand amnesty for everyone imprisoned under this article due to the threatening epidemic situation. When officials have “yes” and “no” options, it is easier for them to refuse. When there is a choice between repealing the article and granting amnesty to those imprisoned under it, the chance of amnesty increases sharply. Immediately following amnesty, one can insist on a moratorium—what is the point of releasing a bunch of people from prisons only to start filling the vacant spots under the same article. And from a moratorium, it is a short step to repeal. But even if repeal doesn’t happen, it’s not that scary—we have already lived for many years in a regime of moratorium on the application of the death penalty.