A drug charge changes your life. Police officers seize your phone, the Crown opens a file, and a court date lands in your hand before you have spoken to a drug lawyer. Whether the allegation is drug possession, drug trafficking, drug production, or importation, a conviction under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act may carry jail time, a permanent criminal record, and consequences that reach your employment, your immigration status, and your ability to travel.
Frouhar Law defends people charged with drug offences at the Ottawa courthouse on Elgin Street and throughout Eastern Ontario. Our drug crime lawyers read the disclosure, test how law enforcement gathered the evidence, and build the defence strategy from the Crown’s weakest point outward.
Drug offences are prosecuted under federal legislation rather than the Criminal Code. A single pill in a glovebox, a shared apartment, or a text message read the wrong way can be enough for officers to lay a charge under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.
The federal Public Prosecution Service of Canada runs these files, not the provincial Crown.
Drug law in Canada is built around the offence provisions of the CDSA, and the drug schedule a controlled substance falls under decides the penalty more than the quantity does.
Schedule I covers cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, morphine, opioids, and methamphetamine, and attracts the heaviest sentences in Canadian drug law. Schedule II covers cannabis and marijuana above the legal limits, Schedule III covers LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, ecstasy and amphetamines, and Schedule IV covers benzodiazepines.
What police officers seized, and where the Crown says it was going, decides which drug charge applies, whether the count is an indictable offence or a hybrid offence prosecuted as a summary offence, and whether a mandatory minimum is in play.
Many clients charged with drug offences in Ottawa have never been in trouble before. Some drug cases come out of a shared vehicle, a roommate’s belongings, a prescription without paperwork, or a quantity the Crown reads as commercial when it was personal.
Legalization did not end cannabis prosecutions. Our defence of Cannabis Act offences begins with the licensing and quantity evidence, because that is where police files are thinnest. Cannabis Act charges run as hybrid offences: the Crown elects summary conviction or indictment, and by indictment several carry up to fourteen years. A cannabis conviction leaves the same criminal record as any other. That surprises people.
Identifying whether the drug case turns on knowledge, control, intent, Charter rights, or the reliability of the search shapes the defence strategy from the moment of retainer.
Frouhar Law defends drug charges in Ottawa and Eastern Ontario. Call 613.238.2000 for a free consultation before speaking to police.
Drug offence charges fall into distinct counts under the CDSA, and each one has elements the Crown must prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The drug charge on your information tells our drug lawyers what the prosecution must establish, and where the drug offence case can be attacked.
We appear in the Ontario Court of Justice and the Superior Court of Justice in Ottawa, and travel regularly to courthouses across the region, including our Brockville criminal defence practice.
Section 4 of the CDSA makes it an offence to possess a controlled substance without authorization. It is the most commonly laid drug charge in Ottawa. To convict you, the Crown must prove each of four elements:
Drugs do not have to be found on your body. Constructive possession applies when the substance sits somewhere you control, such as a glovebox or a bedroom, and joint possession applies when two or more people share that control. Both theories depend on proving knowledge, and knowledge is frequently the element that fails.
Section 5(2) is a different offence altogether. The Crown must prove possession and then prove intent: that you meant to sell, distribute, administer, transfer or deliver the drug. Police officers build that intent from circumstantial evidence, typically the quantity seized, packaging materials, scales, cash and text messages.
A conviction for trafficking a Schedule I substance is an indictable offence exposing you to life imprisonment. Intent is an inference, and a drug trafficking lawyer dismantles inferences.
Read more about our approach to possession for the purpose of trafficking.
Trafficking under section 5(1) does not require that you ever possessed the drug. Drug production under section 7 reaches clandestine laboratories and over-limit cannabis cultivation. Importing and exporting controlled substances under section 6 carry mandatory minimum sentences tied to the substance and the quantity.
Production of certain Schedule I substances carries a three-year mandatory minimum and a maximum of life imprisonment. These drug cases are search-warrant cases almost without exception. Our criminal defence lawyers scrutinize the warrant, the certificate of analysis, and the chain of custody behind every exhibit.
Police who seize drugs also seize cash and vehicles, so many clients face forfeiture proceedings and a companion count of possession of property obtained by crime alongside the drug-related charges.
Drug prosecutions are evidence cases. The Crown rarely has a confession. It has a search and seizure and a lab certificate. So the defence lives in how police officers obtained that evidence, and whether they followed the law.
A drug crime defence lawyer takes the file from arrest through the bail hearing, disclosure review, pre-trial motions and trial. If you are in custody, judicial interim release comes first, and our explainer on how bail works in Canada sets out what a release plan needs.
Drug investigations run on judicial authorizations. Police obtain search warrants, wiretap authorizations and production orders, often on information from a confidential informant, a sniffer dog alert or an undercover operation.
Every search warrant rests on an Information to Obtain, the sworn document a justice relies on to authorize the search. Our drug defence lawyers read the ITO line by line. Did the affiant overstate what the informant said? Was material information omitted? Did the surveillance stay inside what the authorization permitted? Where police conduct exceeds the authorization, or where the ITO could not have supported it, the warrant falls, and the drug evidence it produced is open to exclusion.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives you enforceable constitutional protections during a drug investigation. Our criminal lawyers bring Charter motions on four grounds most often:
Section 24(2) is the one that ends drug cases. Entrapment and abuse of process arguments sit alongside it. When a court excludes the drugs, the Crown is usually left with nothing to prove the charge, and the result is a withdrawal or an acquittal. We pursue that outcome as an objective, never as a promise.
Not every drug offence case should go to trial. For a first-time offender charged with simple possession, the Crown prosecution will often consider drug diversion, which resolves the matter without a conviction and without a criminal record.
Where diversion is refused, a conditional discharge remains available on a guilty plea. You are found guilty, no conviction is registered, and the record is purged after the probation period ends. For a client whose professional licence or immigration status cannot survive a conviction, that distinction is the whole case. It is often the only thing that matters. A drug charge lawyer raises resolution options early, while the Crown still has room to move.
The first steps after an arrest can affect your bail conditions, no-contact restrictions, disclosure review, arguments, and the direction of your entire defence.
Sentencing for drug offences in Ontario turns on four things:
Aggravating factors push the range upward: drug offences near a school, the involvement of a minor, weapons, or a link to a criminal organization.
The drug schedule sets the ceiling, and in several drug offences it sets the mandatory minimum floor as well.
Mitigating factors matter too. Addiction, a Gladue background, age, employment, and a rehabilitation plan all bear on the sentence a judge imposes.
The sentence ends. The criminal record does not. A drug conviction sits on your CPIC entry and surfaces in every employment background check, every volunteer screening and every professional licensing application you file afterward.
The immigration consequences are heavier still. A permanent resident convicted of drug offences can face inadmissibility and a removal order, and the threshold is lower than most people expect. United States border officers deny entry to Canadians with drug convictions, sometimes permanently.
Child custody, security clearances and government employment turn on the same record, long after the criminal justice system has finished with you.
Avoiding the conviction is the objective, not managing it afterward. Our drug defence lawyers will tell you what the disclosure actually supports at your free consultation.
Our criminal defence lawyer team knows how the Public Prosecution Service builds a drug case because one of us used to build them, and that shapes what we look for in disclosure long before a trial date is set.
Our criminal lawyers defend the full range of drug offences, and the charges that travel with them, including firearms offences and proceeds of crime. Our law firm serves clients in English, French, Farsi, Italian and Spanish.
Mash Frouhar, our founding partner, served as an Assistant Crown Attorney before moving to defence. She has run trials in human trafficking, murder, drug and sexual assault prosecutions, and was called to the Ontario Bar in 2009.
Connie D’Angelo has practised criminal law exclusively since 1993, more than thirty years, with a courtroom record built on cross-examination.
Our drug crime lawyers appear at every level of court in Ontario: the Ontario Court of Justice, the Superior Court of Justice, and the appellate courts above them. That trial experience is why we take drug crimes other firms decline.
Call 613.238.2000 for a free consultation. We appear at the Ottawa courthouse at 161 Elgin Street, in Brockville, and throughout Eastern Ontario, and our emergency line runs 24 hours for arrests and bail.
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The Crown proves intent by inference, because direct evidence of a plan to sell is rare. Prosecutors point to the quantity seized, packaging, scales, multiple phones, cash denominations, and intercepted communications, and ask the court to conclude that the drugs were not for personal use.
A drug trafficking lawyer meets each inference with an innocent explanation, and the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt stays on the Crown throughout.
Charges are withdrawn, stayed, or reduced in drug files every week in Ottawa, through several routes: a successful Charter motion, a gap in the Crown’s disclosure, negotiated diversion for a first offence, or unreasonable delay under R. v. Jordan.
Which route applies depends on your evidence, your drug charge, and your criminal history.
Yes, on both counts. Non-citizens convicted of a drug offence face inadmissibility and possible removal proceedings, and permanent residents are not exempt. Canadian citizens with a drug conviction are routinely refused entry to the United States.
Tell your drug charge lawyers your status at the first meeting, because it changes how we resolve the file.
Say nothing beyond your name. Do not consent to the search. Call a drug charge lawyer. Section 8 of the Charter protects you against unreasonable search and seizure, and evidence from an unlawful search may be excluded under section 24(2).
Exceptions exist, including search incident to arrest and exigent circumstances, so the legality is assessed afterward on the facts. Write down what happened while you remember it.
