On April 1, 2011, the Polish parliament amended country's drug law. The debate was heated and speeches were, at times, dramatic. 258 MPs voted in favor of amending the law, 159 were against, and 6 refrained. The amendment project was drawn up by a team of experts in cooperation with the Ministry of Justice. The bill now awaits voting in the Senate, before being signed by the president.

Under the new law, public prosecutors will be able to refrain from prosecuting a person for the possession of psychoactive or psychotropic substances if the individual possesses only a small amount of an illegal drug for personal use and has been arrested for the first time. At the same time, the maximum penalty for possessing a large amount of drugs was raised. Despite attempts by the Social Liberal Democrats (SLD), upper and lower limits were not defined or written into the bill.

In December 2010, an calling for drug liberalization in Poland was sent to the Parliament. Signatories of the open letter, among which were writers, artists and respected public figures, urged the government to advance proceedings on amendments to the drug policy bill which was stuck in Parliament since September last year.

The restrictive law has been binding Poland for ten years. According to the Polish Institute of Public Affairs, punitive drug policies had cost the state budget about 80 million Polish zł (ca. 20 million EUR) a year at a cost of over 2500 zł (ca. 600 EUR) for each arrested offender.

Now, with drug law amended, the possession of any amount of illicit substances can result in a three-year prison sentence. While this is only a small change, it is nevertheless a positive step.