A new local directive no longer allows the police to verbalize motorists who consume drugs inside their vehicle.
All countries of the world are struggling to reduce the number of deaths on the roads. In 2024, in France alone, 3,190 people lost their lives according to road safety data. Main causes of these fatal accidents, always the same: speed, alcohol and narcotics. It is therefore with amazement that the inhabitants of a border country with France have just welcomed the news: in Spain, the police can no longer verbalize people who consume drugs inside their car!
This decree, a work of the Spanish Interior Ministry, comes to fill a legal vacuum. Until then, the law penalized the consumption of drugs in public space or in public transport, but did not specify how state agents had to proceed in individual vehicles. The authorities decided by stipulating that cars belonged to the private sphere, as a house or an apartment can be. And that it was therefore impossible to verbalize, under the law on citizen security adopted in 2015 on the other side of the Pyrenees, a person who consumes a product, even prohibited, inside his car.
However, there is an important condition. This new law only applies when the vehicle is parked. If the car is running, or even when stopped, for example, the police are completely allowed to stop the driver who would smoke cannabis or take cocaine or LSD. It would then be considered as a road user consuming a product dangerous for its safety and that of others.
In Spain, as in France, this offense is very harshly punished. Simple drug detection during a saliva test is sanctioned by a fine of 1,000 euros and the loss of 6 points on the driving license. In the event of conduct deemed dangerous or of a bodily accident, the Spanish penal code provides for prison terms of 3 to 6 months and a permit of the permit ranging from 1 to 4 years.
But today, a motorist who consumes drugs in his parking vehicle has nothing to fear, unless the quantity may make the police think that it is a dealer. A real camouflet for the police, as revealed by Nadia Pajarón, spokesperson for a police union, in the columns of the newspaper El Pais. “Depending on this regulation, anyone can consume drugs inside a parked vehicle and then start on the road, remaining outside the police scope.” This is certainly bad news for Spanish road safety.