Bulgaria Parliament to Inspect Scandalous Drugs Amendment

Bulgaria's parlaiment assigned a committee to probe into a murky amendment to the Drugs Act which allows image commercials of narcotic products. Photo by BGNES

Bulgaria's parliament will start inspecting the scandalous amendment that allowed the publication of image advertisements for narcotic substances.

An illegitimate amendment to the Drugs Act was printed in the State Gazette without the approval of the Parliament or the President. The amendment was not given the green light by either of them, but actually relieved the regime for advertising agencies to use images, resembling narcotic drugs.

A majority of 170 MPs voted Thursday for the motion to set up a temporary Committee to investigate how the amendment was printed in the State Gazette without a presidential decree.

The Committee will be chaired by the member of the ruling GERB party Rumen Ivanov, while Maya Manilova from the opposing Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) will be co-chair.

Parliament has set a one month deadline for the Committee to determine whether the amended is a breach of the Bulgarian Constitution and the National Assembly regulations.

The motion for setting up of the Committee was proposed by Bulgarian socialist MPs, who insisted that the case be investigated as early as March, 2010, when it became known that a text which relaxes regulations on image advertising for narcotic substances has been published in the State Gazette without being approved by Bulgaria's president.

BSP then warned the incident triggered doubts about corruption since the so-called blunder allowed hidden advertisement of illegal drugs and would be of benefit to certain businesses, amounting to BGN 10 M, according to the Socialists' calculations.

President Georgi Parvanov was the one to alert about the change. The Socialist President also called it a precedent, at least since his coming into office, but the Speaker, Tsetska Tsacheva, who comes from the ruling Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) center-right party, claims a check has found a total of eleven such mistaken amendments in the 2000-2010 period.

In April, Bulgarian MPs revoked the changes to the Drugs Law, and banned image advertising of narcotic products.

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