Drug Offences

Drug cases are the staple of the criminal defence lawyer’s practice. By the time you have been a criminal lawyer for 20 years like I have you have conducted literally hundreds of drug cases. Drug cases almost always involve a heavy reliance on search and seizure jurisprudence. After all, there is an old adage in our business: a drug trial without a search warrant argument is a slow guilty plea. How these cases get handled depends on so many factors that it is really hard to summarize the situation. As food for thought, here are a few of the most common defences:

These are not my drugs

• I was just a passenger in the car
• I am only a roommate
• I was just visiting
• this is some other guy’s suitcase.

These are all my drugs

• I was not going to sell them to others, just smoke them all myself. I am not a trafficker, just a possessor.

These aren’t drugs

• You failed to prove through reliable testing that the powder in the baggie is the drug you thought it was.

The drugs were planted.

• The police hate me for a variety of reasons, and this is their way of getting me back.
• My ex-wife/girlfriend hates me, and put them in my bag and called the police.

You forced me to possess/deal drugs

• I was entrapped by the police, who pressured me to do something I wasn’t interested in doing.

You had no right to enter my house/car/cell phone/bank vault/purse/bowels to find the drugs

• It was a warrantless search, which is illegal
• It was a warranted search, but the warrant is flawed.

I was helping the buyer, not the dealer

• I am not a trafficker. I was only helping a guy buy them from some other trafficker.

Marijuana

Whether you are caught smoking a joint at a concert, or have 10,000 mature plants growing in your cornfield, I am uniquely situated to defend your case. I have been taking on, and winning, pot cases since the beginning of my career in 1992. My work on the landmark constitutional case of R. v. Terrance Parker , which lead to the legalization of marijuana for the purposes of medical use, established me as an expert in both the substance itself and its unusual legal status.

I am able to assist you with applications to possess and produce medical marijuana, and defend medical users charged with marijuana offences. I am skilled at all aspect of “grow-house” litigation, including Municipal prosecutions such as Fire Code violations.