A Positive Roadside Drug Test in Türkiye: the fine, the five-year wait and the file behind it

Article 48/1 of the Highway Traffic Code (KTK, Law 2918) states the prohibition in one line: drivers who have taken narcotic or stimulant substances, and drivers under the influence of alcohol, may not drive on a public road. Article 48/2 authorises the police to establish whether such substances have been used, or the amount of alcohol in the blood, using technical devices or test kits. The saliva swab handed to you at the roadside is that test kit.

Under 48/3 the examination is compulsory, not optional, where the driver has been involved in an accident causing injury or death, or a material damage accident the police attended. A driver who objects to the device measurement, or who does not permit it, is taken to the nearest institute of forensic medicine, forensic physician, or a health facility of the Ministry of Health, and samples of blood, saliva or urine are taken there. CMK 75 governs that step, with the exception of its fifth paragraph.

Refusing is priced separately, and the price changed on 12 February 2026. KTK 48/9 now provides that a driver who does not undergo measurement receives a 150,000 Turkish lira administrative fine and has the licence withdrawn for five years. Read that alongside 48/8 and the difference is one word: 48/9 is withdrawal for a fixed term, 48/8 is cancellation. Refusal at the roadside is not an exit from the file.

One further provision decides what kind of encounter this is. KTK 48/10 says that where the driver is suspected of having used a narcotic or stimulant substance, the judicial police provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure apply. From that sentence onward you are a suspect in a criminal investigation, not a motorist receiving a ticket, and everything you say is being recorded as a statement.

KTK 48/8, in its current form, imposes a 150,000 Turkish lira administrative fine on a driver found to have taken a narcotic or stimulant substance, and cancels the driving licence. It then adds that provisions of the Turkish Criminal Code apply in addition. To hold a licence again, the person must attend a driving course and pass the examinations to obtain a motor vehicle driver certificate. Four conditions must be met before the course can even be started: at least five years must have passed since the date of cancellation, every administrative fine imposed under the KTK must have been collected, the driver must pass a psycho-technical assessment, and a health board report from an official health institution confirming no impediment to driving must be submitted to the course.

The contrast with alcohol is the part most drivers do not expect. Alcohol has thresholds; narcotics have none. Under 48/5 the sanction begins above 0.50 promille for private cars, with a lower limit of 0.21 promille for other vehicles, and it escalates on repetition within five years. For a narcotic or stimulant substance, detection alone triggers the whole of 48/8 on the first occasion.

Two further paragraphs of the same article matter in practice. Alcohol above 1.00 promille brings TCK 179/3 into play automatically under 48/6. And under 48/13, a licence that was withdrawn for a term is returned only once all administrative fines imposed under the KTK have been paid in full, so an unpaid ticket from a previous year can keep a licence in the drawer after the term has expired.

TCK 179/3 punishes a person who drives although, through the effect of alcohol or a narcotic substance or for any other reason, they are in a condition in which they cannot safely operate the vehicle. The sentence is six months to two years of imprisonment. The wording carries two elements, not one: the substance and the condition. For alcohol the statute supplies a numerical bridge between them, because 48/6 declares 179/3 applicable above 1.00 promille. For narcotics there is no such bridge; 48/8 says only that the Criminal Code applies, and the prosecution has to establish that you were in fact in no condition to drive safely.

That distinction is not academic. A screening kit reports the presence of a substance or of its metabolites in a sample. It does not report when the substance was taken, nor the degree of impairment at the wheel. The observations written into the roadside record by the officers, the accident report if there was one, and any medical examination are what carry the second element, and their absence is a defence point rather than a technicality.

The second file is TCK 191, which covers buying, accepting or possessing a narcotic or stimulant substance for personal use, and using one. The sentence in 191/1 is two to five years, but 191/2 requires the prosecutor to defer the opening of a public case for five years, without the conditions of CMK 171 being sought. During that deferral, 191/3 imposes probationary supervision for at least one year, which the prosecutor may extend in six-month blocks by up to two further years, and requires referral for testing at least twice a year. If the person complies throughout, 191/7 ends the matter with a decision not to prosecute. If, under 191/4, they breach the obligations, use again, or acquire again, the public case is opened. This route is examined in more depth alongside the other narcotics offences under Turkish law.

A significant share of these files begin with medication rather than recreational use. Roadside kits are calibrated to classes of substance, and a medicine lawfully prescribed abroad can contain an active ingredient that is controlled in Türkiye. Whether the prescription is accepted as an answer is decided on the file, and it is decided far more easily when the prescription, the prescribing doctor, the dates and the packaging are produced at the start rather than months later. Which substances are treated as controlled, and how a foreign prescription is assessed, is set out separately under prescription medication and Turkish drug law.

The second line of examination is the analysis itself. The kit used at the roadside is a preliminary screen; what stands as evidence is the sample taken under KTK 48/3 at an institute of forensic medicine, a forensic physician or a Ministry of Health facility, and the report produced from it. Four things are worth reading in that report: which sample was taken and when, how it was sealed and transferred, which analytical method was used, and whether the finding identifies an active substance or a metabolite. Each of these is a recognised point of attack, and each is discussed in detail in the note on reading a Turkish forensic drug report.

Timing governs the rest. The administrative fine and the licence decision are issued by the traffic authority and are challenged on their own track, within the period stated on the notice served on you; the criminal file moves on the prosecutor's timetable. Losing the first because you were concentrating on the second is common. Both tracks start from the same twenty minutes at the roadside, and how they are run together — the sanction under the KTK and the charge under the TCK — is the subject of the main note on drink and drug driving in Türkiye.