Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán’s new war on drugs

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has declared a war on drug traffickers, announcing that Hungary will amend its constitution to criminalise drug use. However, civil society warns that this approach is bound to fail and a more integrated, health-focused approach is needed instead.

Gergely Gulyás, spokesperson for the Hungarian government, announced at a press conference on Thursday that the government plans to amend the constitution to include a constitutional ban on the use of illicit drugs. This amendment will be introduced alongside other changes, such as the constitutional declaration that humans can only be male or female, and that the protection of children’s physical, spiritual, and moral development takes priority over everything except the protection of life. Hungary was the first country in the world to introduce a constitutional ban on rough sleeping (homelessness), and it will now become the first country to ban drug use in its constitution. As drug use is already criminalised in Hungary, this legal change is expected to have little practical impact. However, the government has also created a new 150-strong Office Against Drugs (KBEH) within the national police force to “fight against drug trafficking.”

This announcement came just days after Prime Minister Orbán declared a war on drugs in his annual “State of the Nation” speech, claiming that traffickers of synthetic drugs deserve no mercy. “Cheap, toxic concoctions, synthetic substances have flooded the country,” he said, referring to so-called new psychoactive substances, such as synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinones. Although these “new” drugs have been present in the Hungarian drug market since the early 2010s, their use has increased in recent years, particularly among marginalised communities, such as those in segregated Roma settlements. According to Orbán, the trafficking of these drugs “must be eliminated.”