“It is the message of a justice system that turns a blind eye to power while targeting anyone who refuses to bow before it.”
In early January, on a podcast organised by young people to address Gen Z concerns, Varoufakis was asked if he had ever used drugs, according to a social media post he wrote a couple of weeks later.
“Determined not to do a Bill Clinton (remember the laughable ‘I didn’t inhale’?), I said I had,” he wrote in the post.
“Apart from pot,” he wrote, he said he had tried ecstasy once, 36 years ago, in Australia. He said he told the truth, but only as a prelude to a warning about the risks of addiction.
He said he had one initially pleasant experience and “danced for 16 hours effortlessly”, which was followed by a week-long migraine, and he never used ecstasy again.
“That was my introduction to making the point that, however pleasant drug-taking may seem, there is a price to pay,” Varoufakis said. He had “emphatically” warned that drug dependence meant “the end of liberty”, he added.
He wrote that he made the post after drug enforcement agents summoned him for questioning about his comments.
“At a time of war, genocide, stupendous exploitation and so on, my little trouble with the inane Greek police is neither here nor there,” he wrote last month.
But he said it was nonetheless “important” insofar as it showed liberties are increasingly being infringed.
“Here, in Europe, many people still live under the illusion that we have liberty, rationality and freedom,” he said. “We don’t.”
MeRA25 called the case against him “yet another episode” showing the governing New Democracy party’s manipulation of the Greek justice system and its turn towards fascism.
Varoufakis, 64, served briefly as finance minister in 2015, in the left-wing government of the Coalition of the Radical Left Progressive Alliance, or SYRIZA, that was trying to solve a crippling financial crisis.
He resigned under pressure after comparing the country’s creditors to terrorists and igniting the ire of European leaders.
His party said he is scheduled to stand trial in December.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ephrat Livni and Niki Kitsantonis
Photograph by: Angelos Tzortzinis
©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES
