Cannabis plants found at your address in Türkiye: the raid, the destruction record and what is actually charged

A search of a home requires a judge's decision. Only where delay is dangerous may a public prosecutor authorise it by written order, and for a dwelling a police chief's written order is never sufficient (CMK art. 119/1). The order must name the act that justifies it, the address to be searched and the period for which it is valid (CMK art. 119/2). Where no prosecutor attends, two neighbours or two members of the local council of elders must be present during the search (CMK art. 119/4).

The plants are then seized. If no judge authorised the seizure in advance, it must be submitted to the competent judge within twenty-four hours, and the judge must announce a decision within forty-eight hours of the seizure itself. If that does not happen, the seizure lapses automatically (CMK art. 127/3).

You will not see the plants again. Under Law 2313 art. 23/2, cannabis grown without a permit is destroyed where it stands: an agricultural engineer of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry — or, where none is available, an agricultural technician — writes a report, the senior civil administrator of the district orders destruction, and the gendarmerie or police carry it out. What reaches the court file is therefore paper: the engineer's report, photographs, a count of the plants, the sampling record and the destruction record. Art. 23/3 adds that the cost of the destruction is later collected from the person who grew them, as a public receivable under Law 6183.

There is no single cannabis-growing offence in Turkish law. Law 2313 art. 3 prohibits growing hemp for the purpose of making cannabis resin outright, and art. 23/1 permits cultivation only under a licence from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, for industrial, medical or personal-care production. Everything outside that licence is criminal — but at three sharply different levels.

• Growing without a permit, or beyond the area or plot recorded in the permit. A judicial fine of not less than fifty days (art. 23/4). One day of judicial fine is set between 100 and 500 Turkish lira according to your means (TCK art. 52/2), so the floor is 5,000 lira. No prison sentence attaches to this variant.
• Growing in order to obtain cannabis resin. Four to twelve years' imprisonment, plus a judicial fine of five hundred to ten thousand days (art. 23/5, first sentence).
• Growing solely to obtain the resin you need for your own consumption. One to three years' imprisonment (art. 23/5, second sentence). No judicial fine attaches here.

Harvested material is charged separately from the living plants. Dried cannabis in the same flat is not cultivation; it is possession, prosecuted under TCK art. 191. That offence carries two to five years, but the prosecutor is required to defer the opening of a public case for five years and to place you under supervised release for at least one year (TCK art. 191/2 and 191/3). If the file also contains evidence of selling, supplying, transporting or storing for others, the charge moves to TCK art. 188/3 — imprisonment of not less than ten years and a fine of one thousand to twenty thousand days. That distance, between a cultivation charge and a trafficking charge, is what most of these files are actually about. The wider framework is set out under drug offences in Türkiye.

The closing sentence of art. 23/5 defines growing as the entire process from placing the seed in the soil to harvesting the crop. So the timing of the raid matters: plants still in the ground put you inside art. 23, while material already cut and drying pulls the file towards possession or supply, and the two are frequently charged together.

Purpose is almost never stated; it is inferred. Prosecutors read it from the number of plants against what one person could plausibly consume, the stage of growth, whether the setup is built for repeat harvests — tents, lighting on timers, ventilation, cloned cuttings — and from what surrounds it: drying racks, scales, small resealable bags, cash in denominations, notebooks, and messages about weight, price or delivery. A handful of plants in a private flat with none of that material reads differently from a room configured to produce a cycle at a time.

There is a second point foreign residents routinely miss. Art. 23/6 makes the interception, monitoring and recording of communications under CMK art. 135, and technical surveillance under CMK art. 140, applicable to the offence of growing hemp to obtain resin. This means the file may contain weeks of material gathered before anyone knocked on your door, and the raid may be the visible end of an investigation that began elsewhere. Whether that material was lawfully obtained — the right offence, a valid judicial decision, the correct duration — is examined the same way as any other surveillance and wiretap evidence.

Whose plants they are is its own question. Shared flats, sublet rooms, gardens attached to a rented house and communal terraces produce files in which several people are listed as suspects on the strength of an address alone. Occupancy is not cultivation, and the difference has to be drawn from the file rather than asserted at the hearing.

Police custody runs for twenty-four hours from the moment of arrest, not counting the time strictly necessary to bring you before the nearest judge, which cannot itself exceed twelve hours (CMK art. 91/1). Where the offence was committed collectively, the prosecutor may extend custody in writing by up to three days, one day at a time (CMK art. 91/3). You are then brought before a criminal judge of the peace for questioning, with defence counsel present.

Two provisions matter at that hearing. The catalogue in CMK art. 100/3 — the list of offences for which a ground of remand may simply be presumed — includes drug manufacturing and trafficking under TCK art. 188, but it does not include Law 2313 art. 23. For a cultivation charge the judge therefore has to identify a concrete ground under art. 100/2: specific facts suggesting flight, or a strong suspicion that you would destroy evidence or pressure witnesses. And under art. 100/4, remand is prohibited for offences carrying only a judicial fine, which rules it out entirely for the art. 23/4 variant.

In practice, the flight-risk argument against a foreign national is built from the absence of a registered address, an expired residence permit, or a short and recent stay. The answer is usually judicial control rather than release without conditions: a ban on leaving the country, regular reporting to a police station, a security deposit fixed by the judge, or an obligation not to leave a named district (CMK art. 109/3). How those measures are argued for is covered in remand and release conditions in Türkiye.

These cases are decided by documents produced in the first days — the search order, the seizure record, the engineer's report, the destruction record — and by the account you give at your first interview, before you have seen any of them. What the cultivation offence covers, how purpose is assessed and how such files are defended is set out on the main page on growing cannabis in Türkiye.