Seasoned Czech and international drug and addiction experts are ringing alarm bells after Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’ government dismantled the long-standing office for coordination of drug policies, signalling a sharp shift in the country’s drug policy.

Addiction services providers declared an unprecedented strike on June 1 to protest the move the cabinet implemented on July 1 regardless of warnings that it could lead to a collapse of the policies which span several portfolios, including those of health, education, finances or interior.

“What ends is a 20-year-long practice,” ex-national drug coordinator and renowned international expert in addiction Jindřich Vobořil told IntelliNews.

Czech anti-drug policies have earned international respect in those two decades, and the country can boast a very low rate of HIV/AIDS rate among drug injection users of 4-15 cases a year, according to the latest national report on addictions. 50-80 people die of illegal drug and psychoactive medicaments overdoses, also a favourable figure by European comparison.  

Experts worry drug policies are falling prey to the populist rhetoric of the Babiš-led cabinet, which his Ano party formed with the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) and anti-green and Eurosceptic Motorists for Themselves parties. The ruling coalition has since pursued a cocktail of controversial policies under a neoliberal mantra of austerity which includes curtailing public media financing, targeting NGOs and purges at public environmental and human rights institutions.  

Vobořil continued that the Ministry of Health under Ano’s watch is signalling “a furthering of the narrative of the pharmaceutical industry”, that is, “the narrative of forbidding and prohibition where everything will be available only in the pharmacies,” Vobořil said.

He explained that government changes are part of a larger tectonic shift not too different from the overhaul of drug policies seen in Hungary last year under former prime minister Viktor Orbán.

Another leading Czech expert, professor Viktor Mravčík, an epidemiologist and head of research at Podané ruce addiction aid NGO and a widely published international academic, warned against the populist “normative ideology” furthered by the cabinet members and some police chiefs, which accompanies the changes in public institutions and which Mravčík described to IntelliNews as nothing short of “a campaign against modern regulation”.  

Staff changes or purges?

The Babiš cabinet insists that the policy changes won't have any effect on the state-funded services.

“Basically, nothing is changing. The coordination stays at the Office of the Government … What changes is the transfer of the agenda. We basically take it over 1:1,” Minister of Health Adam Vojtěch said during a public hearing in July hosted by the upper chamber of the Czech parliament, the Senate, where opposition parties have a majority.  

It was only the 33rd such public hearing in the 30-year-old history of the Czech Senate, and one in which senators criticised government officials for not giving clear reasons for the dismantling of the existing model of drug coordination policies at a rapid pace.

“The transfer [of the drug agenda] itself came from a day to day,” Helena Gherasim, chairwoman of the Council of Association of providers of addiction services (APAS), which brings together 40 Czech providers of addiction services, pointed out to IntelliNews.

Gherasim also noted that “nearly a third of the government anti-drug experts left” following the move. The last national anti-drug coordinator, Pavel Bém, “found out about the government decision via SMS message from the head of the Office of the Government Tünde Bartha,” which Gherasim said “does not suggest it was a systematic move”.

Bém, an anti-drug professional and former Prague mayor from the neoliberal Civic Democratic Party (ODS), was replaced by Dita Protopopova in June as part of the transfer of the anti-drug agenda after he was appointed to his post by the sitting government only this January, and it is as yet unclear who is to replace Bém on a long-term basis.

Babiš’s Slovak-Hungarian cabinet head Bartha has long been viewed by Czech media as having an outsized informal influence over staff decisions and is suspected of co-shaping cabinet’s foreign policy and contacts with national conservatives abroad, including her participation at the Orbán-hosted CPAC conservative conference in Budapest in March this year.      

Moreover, Vojtěch’s words assuring of the continuity of state services contrast sharply with the continued exodus of seasoned drug professionals just days after the Senate hearing, including that of Lucia Kiššová, who was not picked to continue heading her anti-drug department after its transfer under the Ministry of Health.  

“It is a weakening of staff,” Mravčík told IntelliNews about Kiššová, who is seen as one of the most seasoned anti-drug professionals, adding that “it leaves an impression of a purge”.

Underfunding of addiction services

Kiššová was in charge of the anti-drug policy including oversight of grant schemes at the Office of the Government and she did not succeed in the public selection process for her post under the Ministry of Health despite Vojtěch’s pledge of the “1:1” transfer of the agenda.

Kiššová’s experience “will be hard to replace” Gherasim said, noting that it is yet to be seen whether the grant schemes will be started in the autumn in time to cover addiction services next year.

Gherasim and other experts interviewed by IntelliNews are worried about the impact of staff changes on grant administration, and about lack of financing with which the sector has already been coping in recent years. They remain on alert about Vojtěch’s pledge to maintain CZK415mn (€17.17mn) in funding for next year.

“Even with the CZK415mn in 2026 it was not possible to meet all the applications,” Gherasim said, adding that “at least CZK143mn were missing to cover the existing network of services”. 

In a statement to IntelliNews, head of the press department at the Czech Ministry of Health Renata Povolná highlighted that “staff changes inside the state administration are a separate issue from the functioning of the addiction services network secured by individual providers”.

Povolná made it clear the ministry wants to maintain the CZK415mn for the “Antidrug policy” subsidy programme and added that “we are pursuing further strengthening of financing of addiction services during the current state budget negotiations”.

“We do not want to change what is functioning, but continue with the existing work and create a stable expert background for this field,” Povolná responded to a query about the ministry’s priorities. She highlighted that the ministry “does not share the presumption that the organisational transfer of the agenda itself could lead to worsening of the disponibility and quality of the addiction services” when asked about the impact of the changes on addiction services and risks in connection with higher mortality and higher rate of infectious diseases.

Young lives lost

Yet even the successful existing network of addiction services was described as still “significantly insufficient” by Martina Richterová Těmínová , director of the Sananim NGO, which has provided services to drug addicts and their families, including cure, care and resocialisation, since 1990. That was shortly after the 1989 fall of the communist regime in the Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, when modern harm reduction and control policies began to be implemented in the country to counter the inflow of drugs from abroad such as heroin.

The network of addiction services “needs to be as wide as possible,”  Richterová Těmínová told IntelliNews, explaining that the services organisations such as Sananim provide include “care of the client, therapies and social aid,” and that “it is not just about” applying legal drug substitution to clients.

“We need to attend to situations when young people come and need immediate help, but there is no room for them and often this ends in loss of lives,” Richterová Těmínová says of the heartbreaking situations she deals with in her work.

Although there are not yet data available for the past year, “it is clear” that in 2025 “we’d witnessed a sharp rise in the use of medical and addictive substances among youths,” which Richterová Těmínová  attributes to the proliferation of social networks among youths where uncontrolled medical and drug sales flourish.         

There is a widespread worry in the expert community that the changes implemented by Babiš’ radical cabinet and vociferously backed by the head of the National Drug Control Centre police unit Jakub Frydrych could propel a similar emergency to the opioid crisis in the US.

“If the accessibility of the substitution care and harm reduction services falls apart as a result of uncertainty surrounding its financing it alone could lead to a significant rise of deaths, to several hundred annually, and pave the way for entry of more dangerous synthetic substances on the market,” Gherasim projected.  

Her words were echoed by both Vobořil and Mravčík, who pointed to international academic studies, including those compiled by Vobořil, Mravčík, and Kiššová, arguing that legal regulation of psychoactive substances introduced in the Czech Republic quells illegal sales and safeguards vulnerable population.    

“Loss of trust in expertise”  

The cabinet rhetoric signals a sharp shift away from the innovative researched-based approaches to a rolling out of simplistic prohibition-based measures advocated by Frydrych, which could lead to the retraction of existing regulation of low-risk psychoactive substances and limited home cultivation of cannabis for personal use.  

“The rhetoric of ‘the fight against drugs’ is still alive, because it offers an easy answer to a complex problem and with exactly this it appeals to Babiš voters,” Gherasim told IntelliNews, noting that in expert circles such an approach “is of the previous century”.    

The "Power of the Law" memorial to the anti-drug unit of the Czech police outside the Police Museum in Prague. Source: Albin Sybera. 

Richterová Těmínová said she is sorry to see how the populist attitude to the addiction services agenda “contributed to the loss of trust in expertise” among the Czech public paralleled by the rise of “populist beerhouse politics” for which the Babiš’s fourth cabinet is also criticised after targeting environmental resort and human rights agenda. 

“Experience from the countries which placed bets on repression the most shows that tougher punishments do not lower the number of users, but merely push them into a riskier environment and increase the number of deaths,” Gherasim explained. 

She added that the “promised victory” in the fight against drugs “is not possible” because “people used the substances and will use them” and that “our task is to set up such system where people addicted to the substances would have a chance to survive, get healthy and not pose a risk to themselves or to their surroundings”.    

Prohibition over prevention

Frydrych is a known advocate of tougher restrictions on drugs, including cannabinoid drugs, which about a third of the adult population of the country has experienced, according to the latest annual report on addiction.

“From the Korund police operation we have evidence that many CBD products on the market not just damage health after unclean additions, but also often only pose as CBD while these are some yet unregulated substances,” Babiš wrote on his Facebook page on August 17.

Babiš has been delivering much of his political messaging to followers on his Facebook, a dominant social platform on the Czech internet, where he called for greater “control” of “CBD as a substance” in one of his latest posts advocating for greater drug restriction.

Babiš was rebuffed by Vobořil, who pointed out under the post that “the main problems are not CBD derivatives, but wholly synthetic cannabinoids, which have nothing in common with CBD,” and warned that proposals backed by Babiš could lead to CBD products becoming “unavailable for many seniors and handicapped” who use these for medical purposes.  

At a press conference Babiš said his cabinet will focus on Kratom but won't ban CBD, noting “it helps people, and it is part of extracts for curing”. Frydrych argued earlier that CBD is used for synthetic drugs such as HHC or Delta-8 THC, which often come to the market from China.   

Vobořil remains sceptical about the debated regulatory proposals of the sitting cabinet, telling IntelliNews he expects “people around Adam Vojtěch and Thünde Bartha” to “push ahead the prohibition policies”. He is worried that such a u-turn “will result in a mess,” explaining that existing harm reduction policies in Czechia have been successful in “pushing out heroin” for instance, while stricter prohibition policies could reinforce illegal markets from which countries hostile to Czechia such as Russia could benefit.

Vobořil observed that “our neighbour Russia is threatening us with nuclear warfare, and we are mulling whether to chip in some more money for him through a grey economy”.

The incoming staff replacing outgoing drug policy experts resemble “health police”, Vobořil also said.

Těmínová Richterová also remains unconvinced, noting that Protopopová is “an expert on mental health, but we have no idea in what direction she would lead the drug policies”.  

The Bratislava native Protopopová has long been in the focus of investigative media after she filed a 2015 health report on Andrej Babiš jr. which was supposed to prevent his testimony in the Stork’s Nest subsidy embezzlement case in which Babiš sr. stands trial. Protopopová’s husband, Russian ex-cyclist Petr Protopopov was supposed to drive Babiš jr. to Russian-occupied Crimea in 2017, in what Babiš jr. later described as kidnapping, according to the Bellingcat investigation.

Ideological battles or cynical business?

The attention PM Babiš began to pay to drug prohibition also prompted addiction services providers to worry about stigmatisation of drug addicts.

“Families of our clients remain silent, because they are stigmatised already,” Richterová Těmínová told IntelliNews of her experience, adding that what is now reinforced is “the repressive view that clients are responsible for their drug addiction”.

A worker in drug addiction services who did not wish to be named criticised the government rhetoric, and told IntelliNews that in her experience she has rarely met an addict who was not coping with severe personal issues, including dealing with “sexual abuse from childhood”.

Gherasim also pointed out a stark paradox that while the cabinet is pursuing major changes in successful anti-drug policies it remains quiet about other addictive substances which have a dire economic cost.

“When it comes to the actual burden, the greatest real risk for Czech society in the long term is represented by legal substances, not illegal drugs,” she told IntelliNews, noting the latest report on addictions in 2025 according to which “smoking costs us CZK100bn-170bn a year, alcohol another CZK50bn-57bn, while illegal drugs cost CZK6bn-7bn” in damages.  

Frydrych was openly criticised by Mravčík for his June “Drugs Are Not Norm” op-ed published in Lidovky online news outlet in which Fridrich called for the return of “healthy reason” to anti-drug policies and that “the greatest problem is a soft vocabulary against drug risks”.

Mravčík countered in his own op-ed that the “anti-drug police chief should not act as an inquisitor of the prohibition regime,” pointing to Frydrych’s “styling into a role of virtuous defender of normality in a society” and his invoking of “a chimeric world without drugs”.  

The illegal market “has fully integrated into daily digital and street reality,” Mravčík argued, describing the current situation.

“I am in favour of regulation,” Richterová Těmínová told IntelliNews, but “it needs to be thought through, so it does not strengthen the illegal market” and so “repression and prohibition does not impact young people who need to be protected”.

She pointed out a Telegram channel facilitating drug sales on which 300 people were connected in the small hours and the variety of darknets, which she is afraid could receive another boost if a controlled substitution care is affected by the government changes and furthering of the prohibition practices.