Drug Offences

Drug offences are prosecuted by the federal Crown NOT the provincial Crown.

It is important to know that depending on the type of drug you are caught with, the consequences may be different. Different types of drugs are treated differently in the CDSA. If you go on the link to the CDSA (which is also available in a French version) and look at its Table of Contents, you will see that towards the end there are several “Schedules”. Each schedule contains a list of drugs, and it is typically the scientific name of the drug that is listed there. So in order to know how severely the drug in question is treated by the law, you must determine first in which schedule the drug is found.

Once you identified the appropriate schedule in which the drug is listed, you can then refer to the CDSA itself and see how a drug from each schedule is treated. The most relevant sections of the CDSA are sections 4, 5, 6 and 7 that are about possession of substance, trafficking in substance, importing and exporting  and production of substance respectively.

You will need to be aware of the format of the drug. For example, the law is more severe when the drug in question is crack cocaine as opposed to powder cocaine. Why? Because crack cocaine is considered to be highly addictive and has more destructive effects than powder cocaine. As a result, if you are accused of being in possession, trafficking in, or importing/exporting crack cocaine as opposed to powder cocaine, the legal consequences are even more severe.

Drugs have their own separate statute, the CDSA , which is distinct from the Code. The CDSA lists different drugs in different schedules which are found at the end of the CDSA. If you want to know the severity of the punishment or treatment of a particular drug, you need to first identify in which schedule the drug in question is classified and then refer to the CDSA , particularly to sections 4, 5, 6 and 7 to find out how the law treats different drugs.