How does it come to a report?

Many smokers can't imagine that they are still being reported for smoking a joint. And when it does happen, the surprise is great: “Gopf, letschthin am da so am kifferä and dänn's mi doch tatsächlichli usegnoh. And now they've sent me a letter. Two hundred and seven cents I have to pay. For a joint and a smoke. Can they do that?” That's what Roger asked in our legal consultation when he told me about his report. Before I answered his question, Roger told me what had happened.

“So, I was just in the alley, buying a Piece. Finally I had found something for 20 francs, many do not want to sell small quantities. Then I wanted to test it of course necessarily. A few streets away I know a park where I have often smoked. It doesn't have so many people there and is a bit out of the way. So I roll my joint there and when I look up again after rolling, I see two men coming towards me with determined steps. One of them calls out, “Police, what are you doing?” I would have loved to tell him: “I'm testing my new Piece right now!” But somehow that didn't work and I feverishly thought about how I could get out of this uncomfortable situation. But I didn't have a chance, they were already at me, one of them held an ID card under my nose, then they took my freshly made joint away from me and put it in a plastic bag, searched me, found the rest of my piece of hash in my jacket pocket. That also went into a bag, only into the police's bag. Then they checked my ID by radio and finally they pulled out a piece of paper like this. They said I had to answer these questions. But I know that I don't have to say everything. So I didn't. I just told them that I wanted to smoke a joint and that I had just bought it in the street from a guy I didn't know. I also gave my personal details and that was it. At first they asked a bit more, one of them mumbled something about “maybe we should take him with us”, but finally they let me go. “A fine will follow”, they told me as a farewell. Somehow I didn't believe that. Somehow the whole thing looked more like a robbery than a police control, I thought. But today I received a notice of a fine. I would never have thought that even in the new millennium fines would still be issued for smoking pot”.

So much for Roger's experiences. And Roger is not an isolated case, but one of tens of thousands of smokers who get it every year, as we will show with a second example:

A phone in summer. A younger woman calls, quite angry. She was at the lake with a colleague and her baby. The two women were smoking pot and the police caught them. She had one gram weed on her, the colleague had thirty grams. The police confiscated the two bags. This is common practice in Switzerland. However, when the two women refused to answer the police questions about their consumption (how much, how often, where they bought it) and wanted to exercise their right to refuse to make a statement, the police berated them in the worst possible way. The police threatened to call a van and take them to the station, and even threatened them with jail if the two women continued to make no statement. In view of the baby, the two women testified. And in doing so, they incriminated themselves more than was absolutely necessary. This example shows once again how difficult it is to refuse to testify.