Personal Use or Trafficking? How a Turkish Court Decides

Article 188/3 of the Turkish Criminal Code punishes anyone who, without a licence or contrary to one, sells, offers for sale, gives to others, dispatches, transports, stores, buys, accepts or possesses a narcotic or stimulant substance inside the country. The sentence is not less than ten years of imprisonment, together with a judicial fine of 1,000 to 20,000 days.

Article 191/1 punishes anyone who buys, accepts or possesses the same substance for the purpose of use, or who uses it. The sentence is two to five years.

Set the two texts side by side and three verbs appear in both: buying, accepting, possessing. The physical act recorded against you can be word-for-word identical under either article. What separates a ten-year floor from a two-year floor is the purpose behind the act, and purpose is never observed directly. It is inferred from the circumstances written into the file on the day you were stopped.

Three provisions decide how heavy an Article 188 case becomes. Under 188/4(a), where the substance is heroin, cocaine, morphine or base morphine, or a synthetic cannabinoid, synthetic cathinone, synthetic opioid or amphetamine and their derivatives, the sentence is increased by half. Under 188/4(b) the same increase applies where the act was committed in a public or publicly accessible place within 200 metres of a school, dormitory, hospital, barracks or place of worship. Under 188/5, commission by three or more people together raises the sentence by half, and commission within the activity of a criminal organisation doubles it. Under the second sentence of 188/3, where the substance was sold or given to a child, the prison sentence cannot fall below fifteen years. The wider framework is set out in the overview of drug offences in Türkiye.

The Court of Cassation has applied the same test for two decades; it is settled case-law. Three criteria govern whether possession was aimed at use.

The Court of Cassation also asks whether you use drugs at all: the test taken in custody is read against what was seized, and a user's account of purpose carries a weight that a non-user's does not. Prosecutors add a further question — your social and economic situation, what you live on and whether the quantity is in proportion to it — and a defence file should be ready to answer it. A defendant who is an established user, stopped in a routine check with a single wrap and no indication of dealing, is the paradigm Article 191 case. A defendant found with equal-weight packets and scales is the paradigm Article 188 case, whatever the total weight.

No. Neither Article 188 nor Article 191 states a gram figure, and in the Court of Cassation's settled test quantity is one of three criteria — alongside any conduct directed at selling or supplying, and the place and manner in which the substance was kept — rather than a line: a very small quantity sold to a buyer is trafficking, and the same quantity kept for use is not. Quantity assists in identifying purpose; it cannot stand alone as the test.

Where quantity does carry weight is at the outer edge. Courts work from Forensic Medicine Institute opinions, which report that cannabis users consume roughly 1 to 1.5 grams at a time, up to three times a day, and that habitual users may keep several months of supply within reach. On that reasoning the Court of Cassation has treated 276 grams of cannabis as falling inside two months of personal consumption on the facts of one file. Above what a person could realistically consume in a normal holding period, the court will find that possession was not aimed at use.

Because the figures are read off the expert report, the report is not a formality. It fixes the substance, the net weight after packaging is removed, and — through Article 188/4(a) — whether a half-increase applies at all. Errors in identification, weight, or the chain from seizure to laboratory are contestable, and the points worth checking are set out in the note on the drug laboratory report.

The classification does not only change the sentence. It changes the whole shape of the case.

• Remand. Article 188 sits in the catalogue at CMK 100/3(a)(9), where a ground for remand may be presumed once there is strong suspicion based on concrete evidence. Article 191 is not in that catalogue, so remand requires the ordinary grounds under CMK 100/1 and 100/2 — flight risk or interference with evidence.
• Deferred prosecution. Under Article 191/2 the prosecutor must defer the opening of a public case for five years, and the conditions of CMK 171 are expressly not required. Under 191/3 you are placed under probation for at least one year, extendable in six-month steps by up to two further years, with drug testing ordered at least twice a year and treatment where necessary.
• How it ends. If you keep to the obligations, Article 191/7 requires a decision of no prosecution — no trial, no conviction. Breach, or fresh use during the deferral period, opens the public case under 191/4, and 191/6 bars a second deferral afterwards.
• Reclassification at trial. Article 191/8 covers the situation directly: where a defendant is on trial under Article 188 and it emerges that the act falls solely within Article 191, the court must order deferral of the announcement of the judgment. Because Article 191/8 is a special provision, the Court of Cassation applies it without seeking the conditions in CMK 231 — the two-year ceiling included — so the deferral is mandatory even where the sentence imposed exceeds two years; the five-year supervision period then runs, and the case is dismissed if it passes without a fresh intentional offence.

One further route sits outside this classification altogether. Article 192/2 provides that a person who bought, accepted or possessed for use, and who tells the authorities from whom, where and when the substance was obtained before the authorities learn of the offence, receives no penalty — but only where that information makes it easier to catch those responsible or to seize the substance; Article 192/3 allows a reduction of one quarter to one half for assistance given after the offence is known. The timing and the risks are examined in the note on effective remorse in drug cases.

If the file against you or your relative is written up under Article 188 rather than Article 191, the charge carries a ten-year floor, catalogue remand and a fine measured in thousands of days — and the argument about purpose has to be made from the first statement onward, not at the end. That charge, and how those cases run from custody to appeal, is covered on the page on drug trafficking charges in Türkiye.