Not yet medically reviewed, information on this site is in preparation and has not been verified by a medical reviewer.
Findings report

Vietnam did not abolish the death penalty for drugs

On 1 July 2025 Vietnam removed the death penalty from one drug offence and kept it for two others. Almost every English account says either that Vietnam has the death penalty for drugs, full stop, or that it abolished it. Both are now wrong, and they are wrong in opposite directions. Which article a person is charged under decides whether they can be sentenced to death.

The instrument is Luật số 86/2025/QH15, which at khoản 18 Điều 1 replaces articles 248 to 252 of the Criminal Code, in full and took effect on 1 July 2025. What follows is what it did, article by article, read from the official texts rather than from reporting about them.

What changed, article by article

ArticleOffenceBefore 1 July 2025From 1 July 2025
248Tội sản xuất trái phép chất ma túyDeath. Khoản 4.
thì bị phạt tù 20 năm, tù chung thân hoặc tử hình
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with twenty years of imprisonment, life imprisonment or death.		Death. Khoản 5.
thì bị phạt tù chung thân hoặc tử hình
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with life imprisonment or death.
249Tội tàng trữ trái phép chất ma túyNo death. Khoản 4.
thì bị phạt tù từ 15 năm đến 20 năm hoặc tù chung thân
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with fifteen to twenty years of imprisonment or life imprisonment.		No death. Khoản 4.
thì bị phạt tù từ 15 năm đến 20 năm hoặc tù chung thân
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with fifteen to twenty years of imprisonment or life imprisonment.
250Tội vận chuyển trái phép chất ma túyDeath. Khoản 4.
thì bị phạt tù 20 năm, tù chung thân hoặc tử hình
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with twenty years of imprisonment, life imprisonment or death.		No death. Khoản 4.
thì bị phạt tù 20 năm hoặc tù chung thân
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with twenty years of imprisonment or life imprisonment.
251Tội mua bán trái phép chất ma túyDeath. Khoản 4.
thì bị phạt tù 20 năm, tù chung thân hoặc tử hình
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with twenty years of imprisonment, life imprisonment or death.		Death. Khoản 5.
thì bị phạt tù chung thân hoặc tử hình
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with life imprisonment or death.
252Tội chiếm đoạt chất ma túyNo death. Khoản 4.
thì bị phạt tù 15 đến 20 năm hoặc tù chung thân
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with fifteen to twenty years of imprisonment or life imprisonment.		No death. Khoản 4.
thì bị phạt tù từ 15 năm đến 20 năm hoặc tù chung thân
Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with fifteen to twenty years of imprisonment or life imprisonment.

Offence names are the statute’s own Vietnamese. In order: unlawful production, unlawful possession, unlawful transport, unlawful buying and selling, and appropriation. Every band above is the closing lead-in of the article’s highest paragraph, cut from the official text at build time. The English is a translation and is not official.

One article lost the death penalty: 250, unlawful transport. Two kept it: 248 and 251, unlawful production and unlawful buying and selling. Possession and appropriation never carried it.

The change is visible in the wording itself. Before, article 250 ended:

thì bị phạt tù 20 năm, tù chung thân hoặc tử hình

Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with twenty years of imprisonment, life imprisonment or death

After, the same paragraph reads:

thì bị phạt tù 20 năm hoặc tù chung thân

Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with twenty years of imprisonment or life imprisonment

The words for life imprisonment or death are gone and nothing replaced them. In articles 248 and 251 the amendment did something different: it inserted a new paragraph of twenty years or life and pushed the capital band up one, so the death penalty survives at a higher paragraph number rather than being removed.

thì bị phạt tù chung thân hoặc tử hình

Translation, marked as a translation: is punished with life imprisonment or death

The list of substances named in those bands also grew, which runs the opposite way to the headline. Before:

Hêrôin, côcain hoặc Methamphetamine, Amphetamine, MDMA

After:

Heroine, Cocaine, Methamphetamine, Amphetamine, Ketamine, Fentanyl, MDMA hoặc XLR-11

Ketamine, fentanyl and the synthetic cannabinoid XLR-11 were added by name. For those three the amendment made the exposure sharper on the same day it softened the ceiling elsewhere.

And no substance sits categorically outside the capital band. The highest paragraph of each of articles 248 and 251 closes with catch-alls:

Các chất ma túy khác ở thể rắn có khối lượng 09 kilôgam trở lên;

Translation, marked as a translation: Other narcotic substances in solid form with a weight of nine kilograms or more.

Các chất ma túy khác ở thể lỏng có thể tích 22 lít trở lên;

Translation, marked as a translation: Other narcotic substances in liquid form with a volume of twenty two litres or more.

So “not death eligible” is not available as a category claim for any narcotic substance. It depends on the article charged and on the quantity, not on which drug it is.

How this was verified, and why it took three texts

An amending law prints only its new wording. It cannot tell you what it replaced, and it cannot tell you what it left alone. So three separate documents were needed, and each answers a different question.

The before side. Công báo số 1267+1268, 31 December 2015, carrying Bộ luật Hình sự số 100/2015/QH13. This is the official gazette carrying the Criminal Code as enacted, and it is where the pre-amendment wording of every article in the table above was read.

The after side. Luật số 86/2025/QH15, signed original, 48 page scan, optical recognition. The signed original of the amending law, published by the government as a scan of the executed document.

The two read together. Bộ luật Hình sự, văn bản hợp nhất số 135/VBHN-VPQH, Office of the National Assembly, September 2025. A consolidation is the Code as it now stands with every amendment folded in, independently typed rather than scanned, so it corroborates the signed original instead of repeating it. Every band quoted on this page was cut from the gazette or from the consolidation, both of which carry real text layers. Nothing is quoted from the optical recognition of the scan, which misread XLR-11 as XLR-I I and the law number 100/2015/QH13 as 100/2015QHI3.

And the part that licenses using a 2015 text as the before side at all. A Vietnamese consolidation numbers each article’s amendments in its footnotes. Quoting the 2015 gazette as the law in force on 30 June 2025 is only safe if nothing amended those articles in between, and the footnote apparatus settles it without any inference:

Articles 248, 250, 251, 252 were each amended exactly once, by the 2025 law, so their 2015 wording was still operative the day before it took effect. Article 249 is the only one of the five that had been touched before, and it is not an article the finding turns on. This project has three times quoted a superseded provision as current law, so the check is run rather than assumed.

Sources, with the digest of the exact file each quotation was read from:

This site had it wrong, and here is exactly how

Anyone can state a fact. The reason this page is worth citing is the next paragraph, so it is not buried.

On 2026-09-15, 34 of this site’s own 38 populated Vietnam entries were wrong about the death penalty, in both directions at once. 27 of them asserted that Vietnam had abolished the death penalty for drug offences on 1 July 2025. It had not. Another 7 asserted a death penalty for trafficking without naming an article, which collapses transport and trading into one word at the moment they stopped sharing a maximum. The remaining 4 said nothing about it either way.

Those five figures are the only ones on this page that are not recomputed when it is built, and the reason is that the entries they describe no longer exist. They were counted by hand on 2026-09-15in this project’s internal record s31-06, by printing all 27 of the first group in full and reading them rather than matching a pattern. Every other number on this page is derived at build time from a cached statute or from the live entries themselves.

The strongest form of the error read that Vietnam “abolished the death penalty for all drug offences on 1 July 2025, replaced with life imprisonment”. It was not a careless sentence. It was a careful sentence written from reporting that said the same thing, and the reporting was wrong because it read a headline rather than khoản 18 Điều 1 of the law.

They are corrected. 35 of the 39 populated Vietnam entries now name the article, state that transport no longer carries the death penalty and that production and trading still do, and quote the statute for it. The remaining 4 do not discuss the death penalty at all, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight: see the next paragraph. The count of corrected entries is a match on that sentence, so it counts entries that carry the correction, not entries that are true for every other reason.

What is still not fixed, named rather than glossed over. The entries that say nothing about the death penalty were examined and left alone on purpose. Correcting them would mean adopting a claim from a Vietnamese government decree listing narcotic substances, and no such decree has been read here. Writing a capital exposure onto a page on the strength of a decree nobody opened would be a worse error than the one it fixes.

The two counts above have different denominators, and the reason is coverage rather than arithmetic. When the earlier count was taken, three substances had no Vietnam entry of any kind. Their rows held a single entry each, for one country, where every other row held one for every jurisdiction covered, so there was nothing to be right or wrong about. The grid was completed afterwards, and opium was then read against the Criminal Code and given a status. Nothing was recounted. One substance that had been absent from the country entirely is now present and answered.

Attribution

The Vietnamese texts quoted here are published by Vietnamese government portals whose terms carry one condition: Ghi rõ nguồn, state the source clearly. That is a conditional grant rather than an open licence, and it is met here rather than assumed:

The condition asks for the source to be named using a string the serving host accepts. It sets no restriction on commercial use, requires no prior written permission, and sets no limit on form or volume. Each quotation above is attributed to the host that served the file it was read from, because which string binds is a property of the host rather than of the country.

What this page does not claim

The first of those is the one readers will want most. This page says which article can carry a death sentence. It does not say how often one is imposed or carried out. Vietnam does not publish that figure in any source read here, and an estimate repeated from elsewhere would be exactly the kind of claim the rest of this page exists to correct.

How to cite this

Cite the statute, not us, wherever you can. The gazette, the signed law and the consolidation are all linked above and all of them will outlive this page. Where you need to cite the reading itself:

2CB.com, Vietnam did not abolish the death penalty for drugs, https://2cb.com/reports/vietnam-death-penalty, accessed [date].

Corrections are welcome and are checked against the source rather than defended. stephen@2cb.com.

Research and data · What a verified drug-sentencing record set actually shows · Drug law in Vietnam, substance by substance