Drug Offence Lawyer in Markham

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You can be charged anywhere in Markham, at a traffic stop on Highway 7, in a shared house near Main Street Unionville, or when a package lands at your door in Cornell, and the file still ends up in the same place: a federal statute, usually a federal prosecutor, and the courthouse at 50 Eagle Street West in Newmarket. What changes from person to person is the theory against you. Start from what actually happened, and the right guide follows from it.

By Fadi Matthew Kazandji, Founding Partner, Kazandji Law. Serving Markham and all of York Region from our Thornhill office at 7191 Yonge Street. Updated July 2026.

Read your release papers before you read anything else

The paperwork you signed on release answers more questions than most first phone calls do. Somewhere on it sits the statute. A count under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act puts you in the world of possession, trafficking, importing or production, and it means a federal prosecutor will almost certainly carry the file. A count under the Cannabis Act puts you in a different statute with its own offences, its own ticket lane and its own sentencing rules. The section number narrows things further. Section 4 is simple possession. Section 5 is trafficking and possession for the purpose of trafficking. Section 6 is the border. Section 7 is production, and section 7.1 covers equipment. On the cannabis side, the criminal counts run from section 8 through section 14.

The papers also show whether the Crown can proceed summarily or by indictment, and they set your first appearance date. For anyone arrested in Markham, that date means the Newmarket courthouse at 50 Eagle Street West. Markham has no criminal courthouse of its own, so every remand, every bail hearing, every trial and every review on a York Region charge runs through that single building. The Superior Court of Justice sits there too, which matters once elections and bail reviews enter the picture.

One caution before you match your count to a guide. The charge on paper is the police theory on arrest day, nothing more. Sometimes it overstates the case, like a possession for the purpose count built on a scale and a hunch. Sometimes it understates it, and gets upgraded once a phone is extracted and the messages are read. Treat the paperwork as a map, then check it against what actually happened.

Start from what happened, not from the section number

Nobody calls us quoting section numbers. They call with a story. Police searched my car near Markville. A package with my name on it showed up. My roommate kept a scale in the kitchen and now we are both charged. The table below starts from those stories, because in a drug file the scenario usually predicts the section, and each row ends at the guide we built for that exact fight.

What happened	The usual charge	The ceiling	Where the depth lives
Drugs found on you, in your car or in your room	Simple possession, CDSA s.4(1)	7 years for Schedule I, behind a diversion-first gate	Drug possession guide
Drugs plus scales, cash, baggies or phone messages	Possession for the purpose of trafficking, s.5(2)	Life for Schedule I or II	Drug trafficking guide
A parcel, mail item or freight addressed to you	Importing, CDSA s.6	Life for Schedule I or II	Import and export guide
A grow, lab or extraction at a property tied to you	Production, CDSA s.7, or Cannabis Act s.12	Life under the CDSA, 14 years for cannabis	Production and cultivation guide
Equipment only, with no drugs found	CDSA s.7.1 or Cannabis Act s.13	10 years, or 7 for cannabis equipment	Paraphernalia guide
Cannabis over the limits, near minors or from the illicit market	Cannabis Act ss.8 to 14	Up to 14 years	Marijuana guide

Driving with a drug in your body is its own lane, a Criminal Code driving offence rather than a CDSA count, and our Markham drug DUI guide handles it. If a row above fits your papers, read that guide next. The rest of this page covers what every York Region drug file shares: the statutes, the 2022 reform, the investigators, the prosecutor and the building where it all lands.

Two statutes have divided every drug charge since October 17, 2018

Legalization did not shrink Canadian drug law. It split the book in two. On October 17, 2018 cannabis left the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and received its own criminal statute, the Cannabis Act, complete with offences that reach 14 years. Everything else stayed put. Fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and unauthorized pills all still sit in the CDSA schedules, and the CDSA still holds every life-maximum drug offence in the country.

The split has teeth in practice. The 30 gram public cap, the four plant rule and the 200 dollar ticket lane exist only on the cannabis side. And no cannabis count is CDSA trafficking, whatever anyone may have said at the roadside. So it was only weed is not a throwaway line. It is a jurisdiction question, and the answer decides which rulebook governs your case. Cannabis files start at our Markham marijuana guide. Everything else runs through the CDSA guides in the table above. The same divide exists on the equipment side, where a bong is a lawful retail product and a pill press can be a 10 year count, which is exactly why the paraphernalia guide exists.

Why the same baggie can be a 7 year file or a life file

Two dials set the range on every drug count. The first is the schedule. Schedule I holds the hard drugs, heroin, cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine among them, and it drives the heaviest ceilings. The lower schedules step the maximums down, and a few substances most people have never heard of, the Schedule VI precursor chemicals, only become criminal in specific contexts like importing.

The second dial is conduct. Simple possession of a Schedule I substance tops out at 7 years and now sits behind a statutory diversion-first gate. Trafficking, importing or producing that same substance is liable to imprisonment for life. Same baggie, different verb, and the stakes move by decades. The linked guides carry the full penalty tables, so this page will not repeat them. What matters here is the shape of the system: schedule multiplied by conduct sets the ceiling, and the ceiling drives nearly everything else, from who bears the onus at bail to whether you can elect a Superior Court trial with a preliminary inquiry.

What the 2022 reform changed, and what it left alone

What the reform left alone matters just as much. The life maximums stayed. Reverse-onus bail stayed for trafficking, importing and production of Schedule I and II substances. And sentencing for hard-drug commerce stayed severe. The Supreme Court in R. v. Parranto upheld sentences of 10 and 14 years for wholesale fentanyl trafficking, and nothing in Bill C-5 softened that reality. So the honest summary runs like this: no drug offence in Canada carries a mandatory minimum today, which opens real room to argue in every single case, but the top of every serious range is exactly where it was, and prosecutors still reach for it.

Who investigates drug files in Markham and the rest of York Region

Most Markham drug files start small. A divisional officer makes a traffic stop on Highway 7 or Warden Avenue. A call comes in about a hand-off in a plaza parking lot in Milliken. A landlord reports something wrong with a rented basement. Markham arrests are processed through York Regional Police #5 District, and on straightforward files the officers who arrested you are the whole investigation.

The bigger files belong to the YRP Guns, Gangs and Drug Enforcement Unit. Its Project Chatter, launched in October 2024, ended with 23 arrests and 330 charges, alongside seizures the service valued at 7 million dollars in drugs, 32 firearms and 148,000 dollars in cash. And when a file crosses borders, York plugs into joint-forces work. Project Endless paired YRP with the Ontario Provincial Police Border Drug Interdiction Task Force and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration on an importing and exporting investigation that ended with eight suspects facing 34 charges. If a project name like that appears in your disclosure, expect surveillance logs, warrant applications and intercept records by the box, and expect your defence to start with mapping who watched what, when, and under whose judicial authorization.

Who prosecutes you, and in which building

Charges under the CDSA are prosecuted by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, the federal Crown, no matter which police service laid them. That holds at Newmarket, where PPSC counsel carry the drug list. Cannabis Act counts can be handled federally or provincially. Either way the building never changes: 50 Eagle Street West holds the bail court, the Ontario Court of Justice trial courts and the Superior Court of Justice, so a York Region file can run from first appearance to jury verdict without leaving the address.

Toronto runs its system differently, with a dedicated bail centre on Finch Avenue West and separate trial courthouses downtown. If your charge arose in Toronto rather than York Region, our Toronto drug offence lawyer guide maps that world instead. The law is identical. The buildings, the Crown offices and the local practice are not.

Bail in one building, and when the onus flips onto you

Most drug counts follow the ordinary rule at a bail hearing: the Crown must show cause why you should be detained. That reverses for the heaviest counts. Under section 515(6)(d) of the Criminal Code, a person charged with trafficking, possession for the purpose, importing, exporting or producing a Schedule I or II substance, the offences punishable by life, must show why release is justified. The presumption flips, and unprepared hearings lose.

A reverse onus is a preparation problem more than a legal one. The hearings that succeed are built before they start: a surety who can genuinely supervise and answer hard questions, a residence the court can verify, reporting terms, and a straight answer about money. We often spend the first consultation building exactly that plan, because in York Region the bail hearing and any later bail review run through the same Newmarket building, in front of a bench that sees every drug file in the region. Trafficking and PPT bail strategy gets full treatment in our Markham drug trafficking guide, and our Ontario drug trafficking lawyers page holds the province-wide picture.

Overdoses and 911: the protection most people never hear about

The fine print, including how the shield interacts with bail and probation conditions, lives in our Markham drug possession guide.

Records, immigration and work: what rides along with a drug file

A drug charge touches more than the sentence. Simple possession now carries a built-in mercy: conviction records are kept separate and apart two years on, and the law deems the person never to have been convicted of the offence. Other outcomes protect you in other ways. Discharges, completed diversion and withdrawn counts each read differently on the checks that matter, and part of defence work is steering toward the outcome that reads best for your life, not just the one that ends the case fastest.

For permanent residents and foreign nationals, some drug outcomes carry immigration consequences that dwarf the criminal penalty, and the difference between two resolutions that look similar in court can be the difference between staying and removal. Cross-border travel for work, professional licensing and vulnerable-sector checks raise their own versions of the same problem. Tell your lawyer about your status and your employment realities at the first meeting, not after a resolution is already on the table.

Where drug prosecutions crack: the four pressure points

Every guide linked from this page carries its own defence playbook, but the pressure points repeat across the whole family, and knowing them helps you understand what your lawyer is doing in the first weeks. The first is the search. Nearly every drug file begins with a stop, an entry or a seizure, and each of those is a Charter event. If the stop was arbitrary, the search unreasonable or the right to counsel delayed, the remedy under section 24(2) can be exclusion of the drugs themselves, and a drug case without drugs is over. The framework comes from the Supreme Court in Grant, and it gets argued in York courtrooms every week.

The second is knowledge and control. Possession in Canadian law means knowing what the substance is and having a measure of control over it, and that has been true since Beaver in 1957. Shared bedrooms, borrowed cars, joint lockers and group houses all raise the same question: whose drugs, in law, were they? The third is the paper. The Crown must disclose the investigation under Stinchcombe, prove continuity from seizure to laboratory, and file the certificates that establish the substance actually is what police say it is. Gaps in any link are defence territory. The fourth is time. Jordan sets presumptive ceilings of 18 months in the Ontario Court of Justice and 30 months in the Superior Court, and complex drug files, especially project cases with wiretap disclosure, are exactly where those clocks get tested.

Which pressure point matters most depends on the theory against you. An entrapment argument can end a dial-a-dope file, and our trafficking guide explains how. A warrant attack can gut a production case. A knowledge fight can win a parcel case outright. The point of this page is simpler: no drug charge is a foregone conclusion, and the ceiling on the count says nothing about the strength of the proof behind it.

Addiction, treatment and the sentencing off-ramps

Parliament wrote treatment into both drug statutes. The CDSA tells sentencing courts to encourage rehabilitation and treatment in appropriate circumstances, and both statutes let a judge delay sentencing so an offender can complete a drug treatment court program approved by the Attorney General or a treatment program under section 720(2) of the Criminal Code. Which treatment court or program a York Region file can actually reach is something we confirm case by case before building a sentencing position, and federal prosecution policy points the same way for simple possession: alternatives first, prosecution for the most serious manifestations.

The same sections cut in the other direction when the facts are aggravating. Weapons, violence, trafficking near schools or places young people frequent, involving a minor, or a prior drug record all push sentences up, and a court that declines jail despite those factors has to explain why. If addiction rather than commerce sits behind your file, say so early. It changes the strategy, sometimes the charge itself, and often the ending.

Every Markham drug guide, one map

This page is the front door. The depth lives below, one guide for each theory York Region prosecutors actually run.

Why people charged in York Region call Kazandji Law

Drug prosecutions here are federal cases funnelled through one courthouse, and we treat that as an advantage. We know how the PPSC approaches diversion, disclosure and resolution because we negotiate against it constantly, and we build files for the Newmarket bench rather than for a generic courtroom. Fadi Matthew Kazandji takes drug files personally, from the bail plan through the Charter motions, so strategy gets set at the top and stays there.

Kazandji Law runs four offices. The Thornhill office at 7191 Yonge Street, Suite 310 sits minutes up Yonge Street from Markham's west side and anchors the York Region practice. The Toronto head office at 180 John Street, Unit 320 backs it, with North York and Oakville offices rounding out the GTA. Wherever the first meeting happens, the defence gets built for 50 Eagle Street West.

Markham drug offence FAQ

Your first Newmarket court date is not your trial

Nothing about guilt gets decided at a first appearance. Nobody testifies, no witnesses attend, and the court is not weighing evidence that day. The date exists so the system knows who is dealing with the charge and what happens next. For anyone charged in Markham, that means a courtroom list at 50 Eagle Street West in Newmarket, because every criminal charge laid in this city proceeds through that one building.

Here is the realistic shape of the morning. Your matter gets called along with many others. On a CDSA count, the prosecutor speaking to it is federal PPSC counsel; on a Cannabis Act count it may be a federal or provincial Crown. Initial disclosure is provided or arranged, and the Crown carries a continuing duty to hand over the fruits of the investigation, a rule the Supreme Court fixed in Stinchcombe more than thirty years ago. The usual outcome of a first appearance is a short adjournment so counsel can actually read that disclosure. That's normal case flow, not a stall.

Three practical points matter more than anything else. Attend, or make sure a lawyer attends for you, because a missed date creates a warrant problem you did not need. Do not plead guilty just to end the stress; a plea entered before anyone has tested the search, the statements or the Crown's theory gives away defences you may never get back. And bring your release paperwork, since the exact charge wording tells us which of the guides above applies to you and whether your conditions need fixing.

If you were held after arrest instead of released, bail comes first, in the same building, and the bail section above explains who has to prove what. Either way, the first date is the start of the file, not the verdict.

What happens to the phones, cash and cars police seized

Almost every drug arrest in York Region takes property with it. Phones are seized on arrest or under a CDSA warrant. Cash gets counted, documented and held. A vehicle alleged to have moved product can be towed and kept. The seizure lists in YRP's own project reporting run to millions of dollars in drugs, dozens of firearms and six figures in cash, so the machinery for holding property is well practised here.

Where your property goes next depends on the bucket it lands in. Items held as evidence stay held while the prosecution runs, and the phone is usually the exhibit the Crown cares about most, because messages are how a possession file gets reframed as trafficking. Property alleged to be connected to the offence itself can be restrained and pursued for forfeiture if there is a conviction, and that fight runs on its own track beside the criminal counts. Property with no proven link to any offence stands differently: where no charge is laid, or the connection cannot be established, return can be pursued, and we press it file by file rather than letting it sit.

Two habits protect you. Keep every property receipt and tow slip you were handed, and write down what was taken while you still remember it. Then tell your lawyer early what lives on the phone, the bad and the good, because device evidence shapes these files more than anything found in a pocket. What you should not do is phone the officer in charge and negotiate for your things on your own; those conversations become part of the file.

No honest lawyer promises a timeline for returns, and the answer differs for a phone held as evidence and a car held for forfeiture. Our Markham drug paraphernalia guide walks through gear seizures in detail, and the trafficking guide covers how seized cash and scales get argued as proof of intent.

This page is legal information for people facing drug charges in Markham and York Region, not legal advice about your specific situation. Statutes, penalties and enforcement practices summarized here reflect the law of Canada and Ontario as of July 2026 and can change. Speak with a lawyer before acting on anything you read here. Kazandji Law, Barristers and Solicitors. Free consultations: 647-588-3234.