Current Russian drug policy is punitive toward people who use drugs. Moreover, criminal justice in Russia is driven by strong organizational incentives to increase performance indicators of police such as clearance rate. Taken together, these might lead to the use of extrajudicial and illegal police practices, as documented by several qualitative studies. In this article, we explore quantitative evidence of such practices, namely, weight anomalies of the seized heroin that result from minimum threshold amounts established by the law. We find significant discontinuities in the weight distribution of seized heroin near minimum threshold amounts. Placebo tests rule out alternative explanations of the discontinuity and show that the most likely source of the revealed discontinuities is police manipulations with seized heroin.
AitkenC.MooreD.HiggsP.KelsallJ.KergerM. (2002). The impact of a police crackdown on a street drug scene: Evidence from the street. International Journal of Drug Policy, 13(3), 189–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0955-3959(02)00075-0
2.
BeckerG. S. (1968). Crime and punishment: An economic approach. Journal of Political Economy, 76(2), 169–217.
BeyrerC.WirtzA. L.O’HaraG.LéonN.KazatchkineM. (2017). The expanding epidemic of HIV-1 in the Russian Federation. PLOS Medicine, 14(11), Article e1002462. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002462
5.
BidermanA. D.ReissA. J. (1967). On exploring the “dark figure” of crime. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 374(1), 1–15.
6.
CarterD. L. (1990). Drug-related corruption of police officers: A contemporary typology. Journal of Criminal Justice, 18(2), 85–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/0047-2352(90)90028-A
7.
CattaneoM. D.IdroboN.TitiunikR. (2018). A practical introduction to regression discontinuity designs (Vol. 1, p.116). Cambridge University Press.
CattaneoM. D.JanssonM.MaX. (2017b). Simple local polynomial density estimators. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.2019.1635480
10.
DeeT.DobbieW.JacobB.RockoffJ. (2016). The causes and consequences of test score manipulation: Evidence from the New York regents examinations (No. w22165). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w22165
11.
DiamondR.PerssonP. (2016). The long-term consequences of teacher discretion in grading of high-stakes tests (No. w22207). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w22207
12.
ElovichR.DruckerE. (2008). On drug treatment and social control: Russian narcology’s great leap backwards. Harm Reduction Journal, 5, Article 23. https://doi.org/10.1186/1477-7517-5-23
GaleottiM. (2017). Securitizing narcotics: The politics and prospects of Russian counterdrug policies. Journal of Drug Policy Analysis, 10(1), Article 20150010. https://doi.org/10.1515/jdpa-2015-0010
17.
GolichenkoM.ChuS. K. H. (2018). Human rights in patient care: Drug treatment and punishment in Russia. Public Health Reviews, 39(1), Article 12. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40985-018-0088-5
MaY.DuC.CaiT.HanQ.YuanH.LuoT.RenG.MburuG.WangB.GolichenkoO.ZhangC. (2016). Barriers to community-based drug dependence treatment: Implications for police roles, collaborations and performance indicators. Journal of the International AIDS Society, 19(4Suppl. 3), Article 20879.
MazhnayaA.BojkoM. J.MarcusR.FilippovychS.IslamZ.DvoriakS.AlticeF. L. (2016). In their own voices: Breaking the vicious cycle of addiction, treatment and criminal justice among people who inject drugs in Ukraine. Drugs, 23(2), 163–175. https://doi.org/10.3109/09687637.2015.1127327
26.
McCraryJ. (2008). Manipulation of the running variable in the regression discontinuity design: A density test. Journal of Econometrics, 142(2), 698–714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2007.05.005
27.
MediaZona. (2018, September21). Zaderzhivali politseiskogo—razryadili dva elektroshokera [Two tasers were depleted during an arrest of the police officer]. https://zona.media/article/2018/09/21/tosno
28.
MeylakhsP. (2009). Drugs and symbolic pollution: The work of cultural logic in the Russian press. Cultural Sociology, 3(3), 377–395. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975509105538
29.
MoiseevaE. (2017). Plea bargaining in Russia: The role of defence attorneys and the problem of asymmetry. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 41(3), 163–184. https://doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2016.1233441
PaneyakhE. (2014). Faking performance together: Systems of performance evaluation in Russian enforcement agencies and production of bias and privilege. Post-Soviet Affairs, 30(2–3), 115–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2013.858525
32.
PaneyakhE.TitaevK.ShklyarukM. (2018). Traektoriya ugolovnogo dela: institutsional’nyi analiz [Criminal case trajectory: an institutional analysis]. European University at Saint Petersburg.
33.
PaoliL. (2002). The development of an illegal market: Drug consumption and trade in post-soviet Russia. The British Journal of Criminology, 42(1), 21–39.
34.
“Postanovlenie o sudebnoy praktike po delam o prestupleniyah, svyazannyh s narkoticheskimi sredstvami.” The Decree by the Plenum of the Supreme Court of Russian Federation №14. (2006). https://rg.ru/2006/06/28/verhovny-sud.html
35.
SaezE. (2010). Do taxpayers bunch at kink points?American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2(3), 180–212. https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.2.3.180
SarangA.RhodesT.SheonN.PageK. (2010). Policing drug users in Russia: Risk, fear, and structural violence. Substance Use & Misuse, 45(6), 813–864. https://doi.org/10.3109/10826081003590938
39.
ShklyarukM.SkougarevskiyD. (2015). Kriminal’naya statistika—cherez otkrytost’ k upravlyaemosti (Analiticheskie Zapiski Po Problemam Pravoprimeneniya, p. 24) [Crime statistics — through transparency to controllability (Policy memos on Law Enforcement Issues)]. Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at St. Petersburg. http://enforce.spb.ru/images/foto/Crimestat_memo_2015_IRL_KGI_color.pdf
40.
SolomonP. H. (2015). Post-Soviet criminal justice: The persistence of distorted neo-inquisitorialism. Theoretical Criminology, 19(2), 159–178. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480614568746
41.
StamN. C.GerostamoulosD.Gerstner-StevensJ.ScottN.SmithK.DrummerO. H.PilgrimJ. L. (2018). Determining the effective dose of street-level heroin: A new way to consider fluctuations in heroin purity, mass and potential contribution to overdose. Forensic Science International, 290, 219–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2018.07.009
