Substances dangerous to public health according to the Criminal Code of 1922 and 1926: comparative legal analysis and criminal law regulation

Abstract

The subject of the study is the legislation on illegal actions with narcotic drugs and other substances with generally dangerous properties under the criminal codes of 1922 and 1926 in the context of normative continuity with the Code of Criminal and Correctional Punishments of 1845. A comparative legal analysis of the concepts of poisonous, potent and intoxicating substances as subjects of the relevant crimes of the first Soviet criminal codes and the relevant norms of the current criminal law is carried out. For the first time, archival official documents of the highest state bodies were used to substantiate the high degree of public danger of illegal trafficking of potent and poisonous substances. According to the results of the study, legal science and medicine in the studied period had a developed arsenal of conceptual means of describing illegal trafficking and the consequences of the use of substances that pose a danger to public health. The first Soviet legislator took into account unlimited possibilities in the field of chemical synthesis and therefore considered the list of intoxicating substances to be open, referring to any substances whose qualitative features and actual use corresponded to the literal meaning of their names. The concept of potent substances was generic in relation to the concepts of narcotic drugs and other substances, the defining property of which was the intensity of their effects on the body. The continued use of pre-revolutionary conceptual constructions in modern criminal legislation serves as a normative obstacle to the development of the criminal law institute for the protection of public health based on the norms of international law.