The Czech Cannabis Journalist Fighting a “Toxicomania” Conviction

Stacks of magazines are piled high in Robert Veverka’s office in Prague, Czech Republic. In a few days he will leave this office for good. He doesn’t know where the thousands of spare copies—representing his years of reporting and publishing information on drug policy and harm reduction—will end up. In 2020, after a decade of editing Legalizace, Czechia’s first pro-cannabis magazine, Veverka was accused of the “spreading of toxicomania” (síření toxikomanie), which can be roughly translated from Czech law as promoting drug addiction. According to local media reports, police examined 60 issues of the magazine from 2010 to 2020 and