Toronto Drug Offence Lawyers

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Charged with a drug offence in Toronto? Almost every drug charge in Canada comes from one of two federal statutes, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and the Cannabis Act, and the first hour of good defence work is triage: which Act, which section, which schedule, and whether your file belongs in the diversion lane or the fight lane. This page is the map. Every charge below has its own detailed guide, and a defence lawyer at 647-588-3234 who can tell you today exactly where your case sits.

By Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law. Updated July 2026.

Two statutes cover every drug charge in Canada

Start with the statute, because everything else hangs off it. The Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the CDSA, governs cocaine, fentanyl and the other synthetic opioids, heroin, methamphetamine, diverted prescription opioids and hundreds of other substances sorted into schedules. It creates the charges most people mean when they say drug offence: possession, obtaining drugs from a doctor without proper disclosure, trafficking, importing and exporting, production, and possessing equipment intended for producing or trafficking. Everything in the CDSA is framed the same way: the conduct is prohibited except as authorized under the regulations, which is how pharmacies, practitioners and licensed producers operate lawfully inside the same statute that criminalizes street supply.

The Cannabis Act took over cannabis on October 17, 2018. Cannabis is no longer a CDSA drug. Possessing more than the public limit, distributing beyond what the Act allows, selling without authorization, moving cannabis across the border in either direction and growing more than the household cap are all Cannabis Act offences, with their own penalty structure and a ticket lane for small cases that the CDSA has never had. Our Toronto marijuana offence guide works through each of those edges.

The 2018 rewrite also quietly repealed the old Criminal Code paraphernalia offence, section 462.2. There is no free-standing crime of owning a bong, a pipe or a scale in Canada today, though gear still shows up in drug prosecutions in four specific ways. If police seized your equipment, read our drug paraphernalia guide before assuming the worst.

Why the statute matters practically: the two Acts carry different ceilings, different bail consequences and different prosecutors. And only one of them lets police resolve small cases with a ticket instead of a criminal charge.

The charge map: find your section, then read the right guide

Your release papers or the sworn information will cite an Act and a section number. Find your row below. Each linked guide covers the elements, the penalties and the defences in depth, because this page deliberately stays at overview altitude. The deep work lives one click away, written charge by charge.

The charge	What the Crown must show	Ceiling	How it proceeds
Possession, CDSA s.4(1)	You had a controlled substance, knew what it was and had a measure of control over it	7 years for Schedule I	Hybrid; a diversion-first framework applies
Double doctoring, CDSA s.4(2)	You sought or obtained a drug or prescription without disclosing others obtained in the prior 30 days	7 years for Schedule I	Hybrid
Trafficking or possession for the purpose, CDSA s.5	You sold, gave, transported or offered a substance, or held it in order to traffic	Life for Schedules I and II	Indictable at the Schedule I and II level
Importing and exporting, CDSA s.6	You brought a substance into or out of Canada, or possessed it for the purpose of exporting	Life for Schedules I and II	Indictable at the Schedule I and II level
Production, CDSA s.7	You manufactured, synthesized or grew a controlled substance	Life for Schedules I and II	Indictable at the Schedule I and II level
Equipment offence, CDSA s.7.1	You possessed, sold or transported something intending it be used to produce or traffic	10 years for most schedules	Hybrid
Cannabis offences, Cannabis Act ss.8 to 14	Over-limit possession, illicit supply, unlicensed sale, border movement, over-limit growing or involving a minor	5 years less a day, up to 14 years	Hybrid; small cases can be ticketed

A word on the last column. Hybrid means the Crown chooses whether to proceed summarily, with a lower ceiling in the provincial court, or by indictment, with the full ceiling and more procedure. That election changes the maximum, the courtroom, the timeline and sometimes the collateral consequences, and it can be influenced by submissions defence counsel makes early. The straight indictable lanes, the life-ceiling counts, carry election and preliminary inquiry rights instead. And where a ticket lane exists, it is discretionary: an option police hold, never a right you can demand.

Two lanes sit outside this table. Drug-impaired driving is a Criminal Code driving offence with its own screening regime and its own defences; it has a dedicated guide at our Toronto impaired driving page. And if the person charged is 12 to 17, the Youth Criminal Justice Act changes procedure, sentencing and records from top to bottom; start at our youth criminal defence page.

Common Toronto fact patterns, and which guide handles each

Files repeat themselves. After enough years in the drug courts you can sort most new cases into a handful of patterns within minutes, and the pattern tells you where the fight will live.

• The car stop. Pulled over downtown or on the highway, the officer says something was smelled or seen, a search follows, drugs are found. These cases usually rise or fall on the lawfulness of the stop and the search, not on the substance itself. Start with the possession guide, and the trafficking guide if quantity or packaging pushed the charge up a lane.
• The shared apartment. Drugs found in a common area or someone else's bedroom, and everyone present gets charged. Knowledge and control are the battleground, and the possession guide covers constructive and joint possession in detail.
• The package. A parcel with drugs inside, addressed to you, sometimes delivered by police themselves. Importing is the heaviest allegation in the family and the knowledge war is everything: read the import and export guide.
• The phone. Messages that read like sales, or an undercover officer who placed orders. That is trafficking territory, with entrapment issues in the sting cases: the trafficking guide.
• The pharmacy counter. A flagged prescription, a practitioner report, an allegation of double doctoring or a forged script: the prescription drug crimes guide.
• The rented house. A landlord complaint or fire call leads police to a grow or a lab, and production charges follow with a warrant fight at their centre: the production and cultivation guide.

No pattern decides a case by itself. But recognizing yours early means the right disclosure gets demanded first, the right witnesses get found while memories are fresh, and no time is wasted fighting the wrong battle.

The schedule system in 60 seconds

The CDSA does not care what the street calls a drug. It cares which schedule the substance sits in, because the schedule sets the maximum penalty for every offence involving it. Schedule I holds the substances Parliament treats most seriously: fentanyl and its analogues, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, morphine, hydromorphone, oxycodone, methadone and most opioids with abuse potential. Amphetamines sit in Schedule I as well, which regularly surprises clients whose file involves diverted ADHD medication rather than anything bought on a corner.

Schedules II through V carry progressively lower ceilings, and Schedule VI lists precursor chemicals, which matter mostly in importing and production prosecutions. Two precision points worth knowing. Naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug, is expressly excluded from Schedule I, so carrying a kit is lawful, full stop. And cannabis appears in none of these schedules, because it left the CDSA entirely in 2018.

The practical takeaway: the same conduct can carry a life ceiling or a three-year ceiling depending on the schedule. Confirming exactly what the analysis says the substance is, and which schedule that engages, is step one in every file. The possession guide walks the schedules in working detail.

Schedule VI is the odd one out. It lists precursors, the chemicals used to make drugs rather than the drugs themselves, and it matters mainly when the charge is importing or production. The certificate of analysis ties the whole system together: whatever the schedule, the Crown proves the substance through a laboratory certificate, and defence scrutiny of that certificate, what was tested, by whom, and with what continuity from seizure to lab bench, is routine work that sometimes decides the case on its own.

No mandatory minimums, and a diversion-first rule for simple possession

Two changes since 2022 reshaped how drug files are charged and sentenced. First, Bill C-5, S.C. 2022, c. 15, repealed every mandatory minimum sentence in the CDSA. No CDSA offence carries a minimum today. The maximums remain severe, and sentences for hard-drug trafficking are still substantial, but judges now have discretion in every case, and conditional sentences are available more broadly than they were.

Second, the same bill wrote a diversion-first framework into the CDSA for simple possession. Section 10.1 declares that problematic substance use should be addressed primarily as a health and social issue. Section 10.2 requires a police officer, before laying a s.4(1) charge, to consider whether it would be preferable to take no action, issue a warning or refer the person to a health or social program with their consent. Section 10.3 then acts as a brake on the prosecutor: a simple possession prosecution may be commenced or continued only if the Crown is of the opinion that warnings, referrals and alternative measures are not appropriate. The federal prosecution service has published direction to its counsel pointing the same way.

Be precise about the limits, because plenty of websites are not. This architecture attaches to simple possession under s.4(1) only. It does not extend to trafficking, importing, production or the s.4(2) prescription offence. What the ladder looks like at the roadside, at the division and at first appearance is set out on our Toronto drug possession page.

What does diversion look like when it works? Sometimes nothing happens at all: the officer warns and walks away. Sometimes it is a referral to a community program, made with your consent. Where a charge is laid anyway, alternative measures can still resolve the file without a conviction, and the s.10.3 brake gives defence counsel a policy lever with real teeth. A written position explaining why prosecution is not appropriate in your circumstances is not a plea for mercy; it is an invocation of the statute's own test, addressed to a prosecution service whose published guidance points the same direction.

Who investigates drug files in Toronto, and who prosecutes them

Most possession and street-level files are laid by divisional officers across the city. The larger investigations belong to the Toronto Police Service Drug Squad, which sits within Specialized Operations Command under Organized Crime Enforcement. On the Service's own description, the Drug Squad is made up of a Major Project Section that includes an embedded Canada Border Services Agency intelligence officer, a Clandestine Laboratory Unit, the multi-agency Toronto Airport Drug Enforcement Unit and Street Enforcement Teams. Its published mandate covers enforcement on drug possession, trafficking and importing offences, proceeds of crime, and offences committed at Pearson International Airport.

Prosecution is the part that surprises people. CDSA charges in Ontario are prosecuted by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, the federal Crown, regardless of which police service laid the charge. Drug files make up the largest share of the PPSC caseload, and its counsel appear daily at the Ontario Court of Justice at 10 Armoury Street. Cannabis Act counts may be handled federally or provincially depending on the file. The practical effect is real: the prosecutor across the table on a CDSA file answers to a different office, with different charging and resolution policies, than the provincial Crown handling an assault. Defence strategy that ignores that difference leaves value on the table.

Toronto files also arrive through joint-forces work. The Drug Squad's mandate includes proceeds of crime and street gang enforcement alongside the drug counts themselves, which is why cash, phones and vehicles are so often seized together with the drugs. And when a file starts with months of surveillance rather than a chance stop, the disclosure is bigger, the warrant record is longer, and the defence surface area grows with it. Big files are not just worse news; they are also more paperwork that has to survive scrutiny.

Bail on a drug charge, and what changes when the ceiling is life

Every adult bail hearing on a Toronto charge runs through the Toronto Regional Bail Centre at 2201 Finch Avenue West, including weekend and statutory holiday courts. For most drug charges the ordinary rule applies: the Crown must show cause why you should stay in custody.

But s.515(6)(d) of the Criminal Code flips that onus for CDSA offences under sections 5 to 7 that are punishable by life. Trafficking or possession for the purpose involving a Schedule I or II substance, importing or exporting one, or producing one: on those counts you must show why your detention is not justified. Cannabis Act offences are not on that list and follow ordinary onus rules. Reverse onus does not mean no bail. It means the release plan, the sureties and the conditions have to be built before the hearing rather than improvised at it, and it is the single best reason to get counsel involved within hours of an arrest. Our Toronto bail page explains exactly how we prepare these hearings.

What does a winning plan actually contain? Sureties who understand the allegation and can genuinely supervise. An address the court can verify. Conditions that answer the Crown's specific concerns rather than generic ones. And where addiction is part of the picture, treatment arrangements that exist on paper before the hearing, not as promises made from the prisoner's box. Weekend arrests go to weekend bail court at the same Finch address, and a prepared surety who shows up on a Saturday morning is often the difference between release that day and a week in custody waiting for a contested hearing.

After bail, the path. Summary and provincially elected counts stay at 10 Armoury Street. For offences carrying maximums of 14 years or more, which includes every life-ceiling CDSA count and the 14-year Cannabis Act counts, you can elect trial in the Superior Court of Justice at 361 University Avenue and request a preliminary inquiry. The Jordan framework caps the time from charge to the end of trial at 18 months in the provincial court and 30 months in the Superior Court, and delay beyond the ceiling can end the prosecution outright.

The defence toolkit every drug file shares

Each linked guide applies these tools to its own charge, but the core kit is common to the whole family. Drug prosecutions are built on searches, and searches fail. Section 8 of the Charter protects against unreasonable search and seizure, s.9 against arbitrary detention, and s.10(b) guarantees the right to counsel on arrest or detention. CDSA s.11 warrants, and the s.11(7) exigency power police invoke when they act without one, get attacked line by line through the paperwork that put officers through your door.

When a breach is made out, R. v. Grant, 2009 SCC 32, supplies the framework for excluding the evidence, and in a drug file the evidence usually is the case. Knowledge and control are the other constant battleground: ever since Beaver v. The Queen in 1957, there is no possession without knowledge of the character of the substance, and R. v. Morelli, 2010 SCC 8, keeps the analysis anchored to genuine knowledge and control rather than mere proximity. The Crown must also prove the substance itself, which makes the certificate of analysis and the continuity of the exhibits live targets. Disclosure under R. v. Stinchcombe puts the investigative file on the table, and gaps in it become defence leverage. And in dial-a-dope stings, the entrapment framework from R. v. Ahmad, 2020 SCC 11, asks whether police had reasonable suspicion before they offered the opportunity to commit the offence.

Which of these carries your case depends on the charge. A possession file might live or die on the traffic stop. An importing file is usually a knowledge war. A trafficking file is often an inference war over indicia. The guides linked in the map above take each one apart.

And one thing stays constant across every lane: the burden. The Crown proves each element beyond a reasonable doubt or the count fails, and no client ever has to prove innocence, explain a lifestyle or account for other people's choices. Files feel overwhelming in the first week because the paperwork arrives all at once. They get smaller as each element is matched against the evidence that is actually admissible, which is the whole job.

If someone overdoses, call 911. The law protects you.

What a drug file means for your record, your job and your status

Outcomes matter beyond the sentence. For simple possession under s.4(1), the CDSA now requires that conviction records be kept separate and apart from other criminal records within two years, and the person is treated as never having been convicted of that offence. That is a real protection. It is not a pardon, and what any particular outcome means for a particular background check is something to walk through with counsel rather than assume.

Discharges under s.730 of the Criminal Code remain available for many drug counts, as do alternative measures. Where addiction is driving the file, both the CDSA and the Cannabis Act let a sentencing judge delay sentencing while you complete an approved drug treatment court program, and we canvass Toronto's current specialized court options case by case. If you are not a Canadian citizen, say so at the first meeting: drug convictions can carry serious consequences for permanent residents and foreign nationals, and the safest resolution is chosen with status in mind. Older convictions, including cannabis convictions from before legalization, may be addressed through the record suspension process; our Toronto record suspension page explains how.

One distinction worth keeping straight: a discharge is not a conviction, a sequestered record is not an erased one, and a record suspension is a separate application made after the fact. Which outcome actually protects you depends on what the background check you are worried about looks for, and that is a fifteen-minute conversation with counsel, not something to guess at from forum posts.

The first 48 hours after a Toronto drug arrest

What you do early shapes the file more than most people expect. Use your right to counsel and then stop talking: officers are trained to gather statements in the police car, at the division and in the tone of casual conversation, and knowledge is the element the Crown most often has to build from your own words. Do not consent to searches of your phone, your car or your home; make police rely on their paperwork, because that paperwork is where cases get won.

Write down what happened while it is fresh: who stopped you, what was said, where things were found, who else was present. Names and timelines fade fast. If you were released on an undertaking, read every condition the same day, because a breach allegation complicates bail on the main charge. And get the disclosure request moving early. Drug files turn on warrants, surveillance notes, analysis certificates and continuity records, and the sooner those are in defence hands, the sooner the real strategy conversation starts. A first consultation costs nothing and usually settles, in half an hour, which lane your case is actually in.

Why people charged with drug offences in Toronto call Kazandji Law

Kazandji Law is a criminal defence firm built for exactly this kind of triage. Fadi Matthew Kazandji and the defence team handle the full drug family, from a first-time possession file headed for diversion to a reverse-onus trafficking or importing bail, and the firm covers the region from four offices: the Toronto headquarters at 180 John Street, Unit 320, a short walk from both 10 Armoury Street and the Superior Court at 361 University Avenue; the Thornhill office at 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310, serving Markham and York Region; North York; and Oakville.

You will not be handed a boilerplate package and a shrug. You get a lawyer who reads the disclosure personally, tells you plainly which lane your file is in, and then fights the search, the knowledge inference or the Crown position that actually decides it. In practice that means early written positions to the prosecutor where diversion or withdrawal is realistic, Charter notices filed on time where the search is the case, and honest advice about risk before any election or plea decision, delivered in plain language rather than jargon. Recent outcomes are posted on our case successes page. The first consultation is free and confidential.

This page is general legal information for people facing drug charges in Toronto. It is not legal advice about your case, and the law changes. Statutes described here were reviewed against the official federal consolidations in July 2026. For advice you can act on, call Kazandji Law at 647-588-3234.