Is selling pressed bay leaf as hashish a crime in Portugal? Not yet
Portugal's interior minister said on Friday that the Government is preparing a legislative change creating a dedicated fraud offence, prosecutable without a complaint, for selling substances passed off as narcotics.
Anyone who has walked through Lisbon’s Baixa in the early evening knows the approach. Someone falls into step, offers hashish under their breath, and what is actually in their hand, almost every time, is pressed bay leaf — culinary laurel compacted into a block and sold to visitors at the price of a drug it is not.
That is not currently a crime. At most it is an administrative offence for unlicensed street trading, which is why officers can identify a seller, fine him, and find him back on the same corner the following week. The Government now says it intends to close that gap.
What would actually change
Interior minister Luís Neves said on Friday, at the 135th anniversary ceremony of Lisbon’s municipal police, that a legislative change is being drafted which creates a dedicated category of fraud, as a public crime, aimed specifically at this trade. In plainer terms: a criminal offence built for this situation, instead of an article written for something else being stretched to cover it.
The phrase public crime is the part with teeth. It means prosecutors can open a case on their own initiative, without waiting for the person who was defrauded to file a complaint — which, when the buyer is a tourist flying home the next morning, is exactly where the present arrangement falls apart. Neves described a legal ambiguity that has been systematically exploited, precisely because bay leaf is not, technically speaking, a controlled substance.
How it got here
The subject arrived on the agenda by an ugly route. In August a Swedish tourist was hit by a stray bullet in the Baixa during a clash between two groups competing over this trade; the suspect was arrested and released within days, and three more handed themselves in to the judicial police five weeks later.
What followed was a rare alignment. The PSP publicly argued for criminalisation on the grounds that the legal vacuum leaves it without tools; the Iniciativa Liberal filed a bill in parliament on 13 August proposing up to a year in prison; and Lisbon city council, through mayor Carlos Moedas, asked the Government for this precise change.
What is still missing is a text. The announcement came in a speech rather than a formal release, so until a bill is published there is no sentencing range and no start date. Straightforward fraud sits in article 217 of the Portuguese penal code, and that is where it will become clear what the Government has actually written.
Image: Mauro Cateb / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
