Possession of small amounts of cannabis may remain both a criminal and an administrative offence after a contradictory vote by the Lithuanian parliament on Thursday.
It voted to include liability for this in the Code of Administrative Offences, but failed to remove it from the Criminal Code.
At the reading stage, 63 MPs voted in favour of the addition to the Code of Administrative Offences, 60 against and two abstentions.
Most of the opposition Social Democrat MPs did not take part in the vote at all. Other opposition MPs accused them of duplicity, saying that they paved the way for the bill, but would tell their voters that they did not support the amendment.
At the time of the vote on the amendments to the Penal Code to decriminalise the possession of cannabis and its products for personal use, 63 MPs voted in favour, 61 against and three abstained. The result was tipped by the larger number of opposition MPs who took part in the vote.
The parliament, Seimas, decided to refer the draft back to the Committee on Law and Legislation for further improvement.
According to the amendment, the Code of Administrative Offences should include a provision stating that the unlawful production, processing, acquisition, possession, transport or dispatch of small quantities of cannabis (and parts thereof), cannabis oil, cannabis resin, extracts or tinctures without the intention to distribute, would be punishable by a warning or by a fine of between 50 and 300 euros.
Fines of 300 to 1,000 euros would be imposed for repeated offences. In all cases, cannabis would be confiscated.
The amount of cannabis to be considered small would be decided by the Ministry of Health.
Parliament also approved a proposal by the Liberal Movement’s Jonas Varkalis that a person caught with cannabis three times in one year should be obliged to go to a centre for addiction diseases and to follow a treatment programme designed by a psychiatrist.
“If the person does not agree to this, they choose the Criminal Code,” Varkalys said on Thursday.
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