A Moscow woman is facing up to eight years in prison after agents raided her country home and confiscated more than 500 poppy plants growing in her garden. The case of Irina Baturina, a biologist, is scheduled to be heard Thursday in the Ugransk District Court in the Smolensk region.
The drug police raided her dacha, 280 kilometers from Moscow, on Aug. 13 after receiving a tip. Three days later, she was charged with cultivating a large amount of illegal plants.
Baturina, 50, said she had no idea she was growing anything illegal, and that the poppies had grown simply because she fell ill and was not able to take care of the garden.
"Poppies grow everywhere in the Smolensk region, so anyone who doesn't mow their garden is a potential criminal," she said. "Even the judge said that he has to mow his property to keep the poppies down."
Baturina acknowledged that she and her mother used the poppy seeds to make pies.
Baturina's lawyer, Vyacheslav Demchenko, said the plants growing on her property are oil poppies, not opium poppies, and therefore are not illegal.
Neither the Federal Drug Control Service nor its Smolensk branch could be reached for comment Tuesday, but Oleg Kharichkin, deputy head of the federal service, told Kommersant earlier this month that the more than 500 poppy plants found at Baturina's dacha "mean this is a very serious case and talk of pies is not going to get her out of it."
The raid on Baturina's property was part of "Operation Poppy-2004," in which the drug police are aiming to locate and destroy illegal plants.
As of Sept. 10, the federal operation has yielded 1,066 cases of illegal cultivation: 474 involving poppies, 373 involving hemp and 219 involving other illegal plants. In all, 11.8 tons of marijuana, 2.2 tons of poppy stems, 100 kilograms of hashish and 27 kilograms of opium have been confiscated, the service said in a statement posted on its web site.
Drug policy reform advocates claim the operation unfairly nets innocent pensioners who are physically unable to mow their property. Kharichkin confirmed that the majority of the criminal cases involve pensioners. "They break all records for growing poppies and hemp," he said.
The drug police have been accused of cracking down on harmless offenders to justify the service's staff of 40,000 at the expense of more pressing problems, such as drug trafficking.
Veterinarians have been arrested for using the anesthetic ketamine to operate on dogs and cats. Cactus lovers faced a setback in September when a new drug law banned possession of the cactus Lophophora williamsii, otherwise known as the peyote, which contains a certain amount of mescaline, a psychedelic drug. Possession of two or more adult-size plants can be punished by up to two years in prison.
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