For the past month, drug users and former drug users have been giving Hungarian police fits as they march up to police stations and turn themselves in, demanding to be charged as violators of the country's repressive -- by European standards -- drug laws, according to reports from participants and organizers. The campaign has managed to put drug reform in the media spotlight just as a Hungarian parliamentary committee examining the subject is getting underway.
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The self-confessed drug criminals have since kept coming, and are beginning to include well-respected and well-known Hungarians. Eight people turned themselves in the first week in April, and approximately 30 had done so by this week. Earlier this month, established Hungarian novelist and literary figure Julia Langh, a 63-year-old grandmother, joined the civil obedience campaign, appearing at her local police station to announce that she had been using cannabis without ill effect for forty years -- a move that rekindled the media spotlight on the issue.
Organized by the Hemp Seed Association, or Kendermag, a nonprofit group that advocates for drug users' rights and drug reform in Hungary, the "Civil Obedience" campaign is designed to express discontent with Hungary's drug laws. Under those laws, simple possession of illicit drugs, including cannabis, can result in a two-year prison sentence. In a 2003 "reform," the ruling Socialist-Liberal government created the option of a six-month stay in a drug treatment program. In the rhetoric of the current government, drug users are not "criminals" but "sick people" who need treatment. That is not a paradigm Hemp Seed and other reformers are buying, and by presenting themselves for arrest, drug users hope to point out the glaring injustice of those laws, organizers said.
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The Hungarian campaign takes the Gandhian civil disobedience model and flips it, said Sarosi. "Civil obedience is a play on words," he explained. "It is modeled after civil disobedience movements, but it turns the philosophy of disobedience on its head: Why can't we protest by being obedient to the law we want to change? This is Gandhi-style passive resistance: Okay guys, if you think we're criminals, please arrest all of us who have ever used any kind of illicit drug," he told DRCNet.
The campaign has generated tons of publicity, said Sarosi. "The media response has been very intensive and also very positive. After the first arrests, it was the lead story in all the daily newspapers the next day. And you see very few articles or reports that are critical of the action, and those are coming from the right-wing press," he said. The continuing campaign has also led drug reformers to be invited onto television and radio talk shows and generated a letter of support from more than 50 drug treatment and prevention experts urging the government to accept Hemp Seed's proposal and decriminalize drug use.
