Other lawmakers representing the ruling Civil Contract party as well as a senior government official objected to the proposed significant toughening of punishment as the Armenian parliament committee on legal affairs discussed it on Monday.
The annual number of drug-related crimes recorded by the Armenian police surged from 877 in 2018 to over 5,000 in 2023. The upward trend is widely blamed on increasingly accessible synthetic drugs mainly sold through the internet and, in particular, the social media platform Telegram.
“The scale of illegal drug trafficking has increased manifold in the past 5 years,” the author of the bill, Hayk Sargsian, said during the meeting of the parliament committee. He pointed out that the official number of such cases nearly doubled in 2023 alone.
The bill would increase the minimum prison sentence for them from three to five years. The same type of crimes committed by “a group of individuals” using the Internet would be punishable by between 8 and 12 years’ imprisonment. Members of criminal groups using minors to sell drugs would face from 14 years to life in prison.
Gevorg Kocharian, a deputy justice minister attending the committee meeting, said that while the government supports the idea of treating online drug sales and the involvement of minors as aggravating circumstances it is against the longer jail terms sought by Sargsian. He said that they would not discourage drug trafficking.
Other pro-government lawmakers also voiced serious misgivings about the tougher punishment. They said the authorities should focus instead on preventing large-scale drug smuggling into the country.
The government proposed a dozen amendments that would water down the bill. Sargsian said he will try to come up with a compromise version over the next two months.
Both pro-government and opposition politicians are particularly concerned about drug trafficking in or around schools, which was virtually non-existent in Armenia several years ago. The government floated last fall the idea of introducing voluntary or selective trug tests for school students as well as law-enforcement and military personnel.
Artsvik Minasian, a parliament deputy from the opposition Hayastan alliance, complained on Monday that the government is against an opposition proposal to subject government ministers and lawmakers to such testing first. He said Hayastan is working on a relevant bill.
The increased drug-related cases have been a key factor behind considerable annual rise in Armenia’s overall crime rate registered since the 2018 “velvet revolution.” Critics claim that the country is not as safe as it used to be because its current government is more incompetent and softer on crime than the previous ones.