Current Russian drug policy is punitive toward people who use drugs. Moreover, criminal justice in Russia is driven by strong organizational incentives to increase performance indicators of police such as clearance rate. Taken together, these might lead to the use of extrajudicial and illegal police practices, as documented by several qualitative studies. In this article, we explore quantitative evidence of such practices, namely, weight anomalies of the seized heroin that result from minimum threshold amounts established by the law. We find significant discontinuities in the weight distribution of seized heroin near minimum threshold amounts. Placebo tests rule out alternative explanations of the discontinuity and show that the most likely source of the revealed discontinuities is police manipulations with seized heroin.

中文翻译：

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俄罗斯警方是否捏造毒品犯罪？缉获海洛因重量分布的证据

目前俄罗斯的毒品政策是惩罚吸毒者。此外，俄罗斯的刑事司法受到强烈的组织动机的推动，以提高警察的绩效指标，例如清除率。综合起来，这些可能导致使用法外和非法的警察做法，正如一些定性研究所记录的那样。在本文中，我们探讨了此类做法的定量证据，即由法律规定的最低阈值数量导致的缉获海洛因重量异常。我们发现缉获的海洛因重量分布在接近最低阈值数量时存在显着的不连续性。安慰剂测试排除了对不连续性的其他解释，并表明所揭示的不连续性的最可能来源是警方对缴获的海洛因进行了操纵。