Two students in their final year of high school were arrested Feb. 12 under Tunisia’s draconian Law 52, which punishes the consumption or possession of cannabis with prison time and heavy fines. The public outcry reached enough of a fever pitch that the government felt compelled to respond.

“No to the prison sentence!” said Prime Minister Youssef Chahed during a visit to the soon-to-be-reopened El Amal, a drug rehabilitation facility. El Amal was the country’s only drug abuse treatment and prevention center before it was closed several years ago. Its reopening, a move supported by the Health Ministry, along with Chahed’s public statement, perhaps offers a bit of cautious optimism that the government might be willing to reconsider its treatment of drug users and abusers.

“Law 52 is a law from the dictatorship [of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali],” Antonio Manganella, the director of Lawyers Without Borders (ASF), told Al-Monitor during a recent visit to the organization’s Tunis office. “The goal of the law was to terrorize the population and make them shut their mouths.” According to Manganella, the legislation targeted Tunisians who were seen as “against the system.”

Tunisia’s penal code is more than a century old, and until recently, reforms introduced to it were done so “during the darkest days of the Tunisian dictatorship,” said Manganella. Law 52, implemented in 1992, punishes any type of possession of cannabis and its use. Usage is a particularly contentious issue legally, as THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, can be found in a person’s urine as long as 67 days after consumption. In Tunisia, anyone who is randomly stopped and taken into custody by police can be subjected to a urine test, even for non-drug-related incidents.