Your drug test came back positive in Türkiye, and what the prosecutor must do with it.

Article 191 of the Turkish Penal Code punishes the person who buys, accepts or possesses a narcotic or stimulant substance for use, or who uses one, with two to five years' imprisonment. Using is listed as an act in its own right. Nothing has to have been found in a pocket, a car or a room for the article to be engaged, which is why a file can rest on a urine or blood result alone.

The article sets out no quantity, no threshold and no minimum. What it does add is one aggravation: where the conduct takes place within two hundred metres of buildings and facilities where people gather for treatment, education, military or social purposes — schools, dormitories, hospitals, barracks, places of worship and the like — in public or publicly accessible places, the penalty is increased by half (191/10).

What a result does not establish is supply. Selling, dispatching, transporting, storing, buying, accepting or possessing under Article 188/3 carries not less than ten years, and that characterisation is drawn from quantity, packaging, cash, scales and message traffic — not from a laboratory report about your body. A positive test points at use. It is the rest of the file, and very often your own explanation of where the substance came from, that can move the file to the other article.

Before the result matters, the order behind it does. Under CMK 75/1, an internal body examination of a suspect, or the taking of blood or comparable biological samples and samples such as hair, saliva or nails, is decided by a judge or court — on the prosecutor's or the victim's application, or of its own motion — and by the prosecutor only where delay carries risk. A prosecutor's order is put before a judge within twenty-four hours, the judge rules within twenty-four hours, and an order that is not approved is void, with the evidence obtained under it unusable.

Your consent is not an element of that decision, so refusal is not the mechanism the Code offers you. What it offers instead is a set of limits, and they are worth checking rather than arguing about consent:

• the intervention must carry no danger to health (75/2), and may be performed only by a doctor or another health professional (75/3);
• where the offence carries a maximum of less than two years, no internal examination and no sample may be taken at all (75/5) — Article 191, at five years, sits above that line, so this bar does not help here;
• analysis of the sample by molecular genetic methods may be run only to establish whether a finding belongs to the suspect, the accused or the victim, and only a judge may order it (CMK 78 and 79);
• the results are personal data: they may not be used for another purpose, nor passed to anyone by those entitled to read the file (CMK 80/1);
• the judge's or court's decision can be challenged by objection (75/6).

One paragraph explains why a roadside case feels different from a police-station one: CMK 75/7 preserves the special-law rules on alcohol testing and blood sampling, which is the separate track a traffic stop follows under drink and drug driving.

The analysis takes time; the statement does not wait for it. If you were apprehended, custody runs to twenty-four hours from the moment of apprehension under CMK 91/1, plus a period of no more than twelve hours for transfer to the nearest judge. In many use files there is no custody at all: you are asked questions, asked to sign, and sent away long before anyone has a result.

Three provisions govern what is taken from you in that room. Under CMK 147/1-a you are obliged to answer questions about your identity truthfully. Under 147/1-c you must be told that you may choose a lawyer, and that the bar will assign one if you cannot. Under 147/1-e you must be told that saying nothing about the alleged offence is your legal right. And CMK 148/4 is the one people do not know: a statement taken by the police without a lawyer present cannot be the basis of a judgment unless you confirm it before a judge or court.

Language sits on top of all of it. Under CMK 202/3 the interpreter rules apply to a suspect heard during the investigation, and the interpreter is appointed by the judge or the prosecutor rather than chosen from whoever happens to be in the corridor. Signing a Turkish record you have not heard in your own language is the most common avoidable mistake at this stage; what the rules actually guarantee is set out under interpreters and language rights.

If the result is going to be explained by medication, that explanation belongs at the start, with the prescription, the prescribing doctor and the dates. Turkish law reaches prescription-only substances that produce a narcotic or stimulant effect through TCK 188/6, which applies the trafficking paragraphs to them while allowing the sentence to be reduced by up to half. That is why a medicine that is unremarkable at home is not an unremarkable matter here — see prescription medication and Turkish drug law.

At the end of the investigation the prosecutor does not weigh up whether to indict. Under TCK 191/2, in an investigation opened for this offence a decision deferring the opening of a public prosecution for five years is made, expressly without the conditions in CMK 171 being sought — so the usual requirements of no earlier prison sentence and full compensation of loss do not apply. The prosecutor warns you what will follow if you breach the obligations, and since the 2023 amendment the deferral decision is notified to law enforcement units as well.

The deferral is nonetheless recorded. Article 191/9 applies CMK 171 where this article has no contrary rule, and CMK 171/5 provides that deferral decisions are kept in a dedicated system, usable only where a prosecutor, judge or court asks for them in connection with an investigation or prosecution. That is not a conviction entry, and the distinction decides what a certificate shows — see criminal records in Türkiye.