Russian woman faces 20 years in prison for buying a legal antidepressant.
Daria Beliaeva, 24, has a psychiatric diagnosis.
She has been undergoing treatment since 2012. However, Amitriptyline, which is usually prescribed in cases like Daria’s, was ineffective in her treatment.
In April of 2019, Daria learned about Bupropion, a psychiatric medication also known under the brand names Wellbutrin and Zyban. (She consulted with her psychiatrist, who checked and confirmed that the drug isn’t on the list of controlled substances in Russia.)
It is impossible to buy Bupropion in Russian drugstores because the manufacturer stopped shipping it to Russia in 2016.
So Daria decided to buy it from an online pharmacy in Poland. After receiving her order, Daria was detained and her phone was seized, so she was unable to call her relatives or a lawyer. The duty solicitor appeared only after Daria was forced to write a confession and was sent for interrogation.
After this, she was charged with drug contraband “in particularly large quantity”, which is an offense punished by a jail term of 10 to 20 years. The “particularly large quantity” was 30 pills of Bupropion. Russian custom officers decided to equate the weight of antidepressant to the weight of an illegal drug Methcathinone, which, theoretically, could be synthesized from Bupropion in a chemical lab.
According to Wikipedia, in 2016 Wellbutrin was the 4th most prescribed antidepressant in the US, with more than 23 million prescriptions.
The first chemical examination of pills, conducted by the customs, had a lot of mistakes. The second examination was conducted by the police and was identical to the first. Daria and her lawyer paid for an independent examination and demanded to include its results into the criminal case materials. Since the case could fall apart because of that, detective have ordered to test Bupropion on animals. However, the effect the drug has on animals differs from the effect it has on humans, so this is a non-relevant request.
I am posting this because this should know as many people as possible, it is ridiculous situation with the russian drug laws. Innocent people should`nt go to jail.
P.S. And I am really sorry for the year of silence in tumblr. I hope to fix that soon =)
the sheer number of people replying positively to the idea of fucking supermarket security having free reign to execute you for shoplifting is insane i mean neurodivergent
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