Object of Special Theft
Ownership always assumes that a person legally possesses a certain property. Trafficked narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances are not subject to civil rights, though they have a certain price on the black market. When purchasing them, the person transfers the agreed amount of money to the distributor; however, this transaction by Art. 167 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation is void, on the basis of which it does not entail legal consequences and is invalid from the moment of its commission. As a result, such a transaction does not give rise to consequences in the form of property rights. The right of ownership does not arise even in the case of unauthorized collection of narcotic plants or their parts, since appropriation of things publicly available for collection is allowed only in cases specially established by law (Article 221 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation). In the legal sense, the narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances in illicit traffic cannot be owned and, accordingly, relations regarding these drugs and substances are not subject to protection. The actual illegal possession, use, and disposal of the indicated means and substances can be called quasi-property or pseudo-property, or otherwise, but among the tasks listed in Part 1 of Art. 2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the protection of such relations is not included. Criminal legislation takes under protection only the objects recognized as valuable within the framework of a particular society. Special types of theft (Articles 164, 221, 226, 229 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) differ from thefts provided for in Art. 158-162 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, primarily by the fact that they infringe not only on property relations, but also on other relations protected by law. Moreover, in some cases, special theft may not infringe on property relations, or such infringement may be insignificant (the minimum value of the thing). Based on this, it should be argued that property relations are not a mandatory object of special theft.