Before visiting another country, the traveler will have a lot of trouble. One of the mandatory stages of preparing for a voyage is studying the list of allowed baggage. Many people take a whole first-aid kit with them on the road and it is because of it that they face serious problems at customs. Not all drugs can be transported across the Russian border. If you cannot do without a healing potion, take care of the permits in advance.
Recently, on the territory of the Customs Union of the three countries - Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan - legislation was allowed to transport some medicines and medical products across the border without a license from the Ministry of Industry and Trade and permission from Roszdravnadzor. This became possible after numerous appeals of citizens to Russian customs officers. According to the Federal Customs Service of the Russian Federation, the law applies even to drugs that are not registered in the country.
The innovation has several important limitations. First, all medicines in your baggage must be for personal use for medical reasons, and not for commercial purposes. To prove that the drugs are mandatory in a travel first-aid kit, a doctor's certificate or prescription is enough (a duplicate is possible). It is also good to stock up on an extract from the medical history.
The second limiting point of the customs law is that medicines should not contain any psychotropic and narcotic substances. An annotation in the pharmacy package will tell you about the composition of the drug. Sleeping pills, sedatives, diuretics, heart medications, and even some "harmless" cough medicines - this is just a small list of drugs with a possible content of prohibited elements.
If a medicine is prescribed by a doctor, but narcotic and psychotropic substances are present in it, it must be declared. You will write a statement to the customs officers in the prescribed form, where you will give all the exact information about your baggage and attach the corresponding medical certificates to it. After that, a small amount of the drug can be taken with you.
When all the formalities are met, you will be free to transport the medicine across the borders of the Customs Union - domestic, Belarusian, Kazakh. However, if you are going to Europe, America or Asian countries, be careful - each state independently decides which drugs are harmless and which is a drug.
Suffice it to recall the sensational story of 2012 - a Russian woman tried to smuggle her usual sleeping pills to Estonia and was prosecuted. For transporting some drugs that are freely sold in Russian pharmacies, you may even be given a prison sentence abroad. So, the UAE is very picky about travel kits - many codeine-based products, antiviral and pain relieving drugs are prohibited here. More than 60 names of drugs in the Emirates are equated to drugs. In Canada and the European Union countries on the black list - sleeping pills with melatonin; herbal preparations (especially from India and China) also cannot be transported across many borders.
Do not play with harsh law - ignorance of the rules of the country you are going to visit will not be an excuse for you. So that a joyful trip does not turn into a serious problem, first visit the nearest diplomatic mission of a particular country and familiarize yourself with all applicable baggage requirements and the list of permits.
