By Jon Hiltz

 

Marijuana.com Interviews the Toronto Police

Any decent journalist will tell you that when reporting on a story, it’s important to remain as unbiased as possible, even when writing about situations you may disagree with or interviewing people who have a vastly different viewpoint of the topic at hand. Nevertheless, a story is only complete when told from both sides, and sadly that is not done enough in the media these days.

On May 26th, Toronto Police executed what is now widely known as Project Claudia, where police raided 45 dispensaries and laid 90 charges filed against dispensary owners and their staff. This event was met with the usual disgust and outrage from the cannabis community, who are all too familiar with the shadow of the law after almost one hundred years of unnecessary prohibition and persecution.

Marijuana.com has reported on how our community was adversely affected and the unfortunate challenges it brings for patients and others looking to access cannabis and we have done so by interviewing various people within our community. This time, we were able to speak with Mark Pugash, who is the Director of Corporate Communications for the Toronto Police, to provide their perspective on why Project Claudia was needed. We challenged him on a number of these issues and police actions and here is what he had to say.

What was Project Claudia and why was it executed?

It was executed because our position with the sale of marijuana has always been that we respond where there are complaints or public safety issues. We’ve had complaints, we’ve identified some public safety issues and so our position has been consistent for some time.

We’ve seen a massive increase in the number of illegal outlets and we subsequently identified quite a number of them fairly close to schools and so we took the steps we felt were necessary to respond to the complaints and public safety issues and to the fact that we’ve seen widespread flouting of the law.

In terms of the number of complaints there were rumours that there were only 100 to 150 can you confirm that there were more than that?

I don’t have the exact number but people use that as a way of saying it doesn’t matter because there weren’t that many. It wasn’t done solely on that basis, it was done on public safety issues, it was done on complaints, it was done on the fact that we have seen what we believe a widespread flouting of the law.

It was set up in a way to make it absolutely clear that we weren’t going after individual users, we were not doing anything to disrupt the flow of marijuana to people who have the legitimate documentation that they need by from the legitimately set up enterprises that are in accordance with the laws of Canada.

Toronto Police conducted 45 raids and laid 90 charges, was the decision made to hit them all?

I don’t want you to assume that the project is over. The project is continuing and I know for a fact that the work of the investigators has continued since last week.

But why hit them all, why not hit the ones that you know for sure are violating?

We believe that if you are a dispensary and you are not one that is set up by the laws of Canada, then by definition what you’re doing is against the law.

What do you say to those who are claiming that the current system of mail-order medical marijuana is not an adequate system for people to access medicine?

What I would say is, that in and of itself is not a license to break the law and if you believe that the system has shortcomings then you work through your elected officials and you work through the government to improve the system. But if you are unhappy with the system, breaking the law is not a satisfactory response.

Can I present a hypothetical scenario to you?

Please, go ahead.

Say for example you have a relative who had an illness, and this illness was mainly treated by marijuana. They were having problems with accessing their cannabis, and the only option they had left was to go to a dispensary. Would you advise the person in your family that they shouldn’t go?

I don’t respond to carefully constructed hypotheticals based on family relatives.

The fact is, if you decide you want to break the law, and I’m absolutely familiar with the doctrine of civil disobedience, if you feel you have no choice but to disobey the law then you must put up with the consequences. A lot of people don’t seem prepared to do that they want to ignore the law without consequences and that’s not how civil disobedience works. If you want to take what you believe to be a principled stand then you must put up with the consequences.

What you cannot do is ignore the law or deliberately break the law but then claim that there shouldn’t be any consequences.

In your opinion, do you believe that Project Claudia was an excess of force? Were that many officers needed? In some cases people were talking about doors being kicked in…

The only time doors were forced was when they were locked. Normally in cases when people are charged with these offences they’re held in custody overnight before they go to court the next day, that did not happen in this case. We did not arrest users.

If police officers are executing a warrant then for everyone’s protection, until they determine who is who, people will be restrained and as soon as it’s determined they can be released they will be released. There were steps that would normally be taken that weren’t taken.

It was a conscious decision to not keep people in custody overnight and the other thing that we certainly didn’t do, we didn’t publicize it as it was happening, we didn’t have media along. We didn’t do that because we were determined that this was going to be low key.

So from the police perspective there was restraint shown you’re saying?

What I’m saying is we didn’t do things that were normally done because we were determined that the tone of this project was going to be different.

Would you say the Police Department was influenced by City Hall and the talk of the Mayor saying this was the ‘wild west’ in regards to dispensaries?

Not at all and let me explain why, this project was in the planning stages before that. You don’t do something of this size in three days on the back of an envelope. There were a large number of officers involved and it takes a long time to organize and coordinate.So it just happened to be a coincidence that John Tory was talking about this the same time you were planning?

So it just happened to be a coincidence that John Tory was talking about this the same time you were planning?

We had been planning for some time and this is a subject of interest in the city and John Tory was absolutely clear when he was asked, that no one has the right to direct the Chief of Police in operational matters. You call it a coincidence as though suggesting through slight sarcasm. I would say this is a subject that has been on the front page of the newspapers for some time.

We had an operation in the planning stages for some time the fact that subsequent to the beginning of our planning the mayor spoke about it, to me means absolutely nothing.

Sarcasm aside you also know how the world works, when people do things there’s still coordination involved…

There’s no reason why you would understand how long these things take because you’ve never been exposed to them, but I have for many, many years. These things take a long time. For example, we had a takedown yesterday, a gun and gang takedown that has been in the works since January and we had six hundred officers. We didn’t have six hundreds officers in this other project but we had a significant number and it had been in the planning stages for some time.

At the end of the day guns and gangs are one thing, marijuana has always as you know been an area of debate. We are now just waking up to realize that the government has been lying to us for eighty years and we’re coming out of it.

That leads into my next question. You are well aware that a federal judge in Vancouver ruled that how Canadians access marijuana through the mail is unconstitutional. This has created a grey area within the law. Does that court decision play any role in your decision in going and arresting people?

I don’t believe there’s a grey area and Chief Saunders was clear in the news conference, we had discussions in great detail with federal prosecutors before we made this decision. This isn’t our interpretation of the law, the interpretation that we get comes from people who will be prosecuting these cases and they were absolutely clear that there is no grey area. I think the most compelling argument comes from people who will actually be prosecuting these cases.

We didn’t do this on our own, we wanted to make sure that we were putting considerable effort into this, that it would have the best possible chance of success which is why we had detailed conversations with federal drug prosecutors because they are the ones who do this for a living and have access to the latest that the law says and their message to us was very clear.

So what did these prosecutors say about the BC decision?

The issue is not one case in British Columbia, the case is in this circumstance is, is there a reasonable prospect of conviction if we go down this road? That’s the question that we ask. It’s not up to us to say ‘what about this judgement, what about that judgement’.

But is that the right question to ask?

The question is, given the state of the law, does it make sense for us to do what we do. That is to me, the only question worth asking.

But isn’t it possible you’re getting the wrong information from these prosecutors? Isn’t it possible that they are making the wrong decision?

Please suggest to me someone who has a better understanding of the law.

How about a Judge who sits on the bench in federal court who says that this is unconstitutional and that you have six months to work it out?

I know that people pick the people they want to believe and by all means put that forward but, no. What we did is we went to the people who do this for a living and we didn’t just take them at face value we had discussions with them and I think we had an obligation to speak to them to make sure that we’re taking all the reasonable and prudent steps and the fact is we’ve done that, so we’re going forward on that basis.

What do you think the Judge in Vancouver would have to say about that?

That’s not my concern, I don’t speculate about what someone else may have to say.

I understand and that’s a fair answer but I’m assuming you can understand that there are people on the other side who might disagree with you.

Absolutely. There are many, many people who disagree, quite a number of whom feel that if they keep saying it’s legal that it’ll somehow make it legal.

Well there’s a lot of confusion on behalf of the citizens and here’s why. You have the judges saying one thing, the police are clearly saying it’s still illegal and we’re going to arrest you and there’s a whole area here where the black and white lines of the law have seemingly (maybe not on your side), but on the other side, seemingly been blurred.

Here’s the other thing however, we didn’t take anyone by surprise we gave them warnings. I would suspect a lot of them thought it was a bluff.

Ten days before, we said ‘what you’re doing is illegal, we said to landlords that you have obligations under the law if you allow this to continue there are remedies open to us under the CDSA, under the Criminal Code, up to and including seizing your building. That’s a pretty clear statement that what you’re doing is illegal. Some landlords apparently responded but given that we gave people a ten-day warning, the idea that this somehow came as a shock strikes me as incredible.

People didn’t think it was a bluff, what they thought was that you were going in on the zoning bylaws, nobody expected arrests. Everyone expected that they were going to get fines that were so crippling that they would have to shut down. They thought that bylaw officers were coming, nobody believed that there was going to be raids and arrests.

Do you personally believe marijuana should be legal?

My views are irrelevant. The government has said that within a year they will legalize and they talk about the mechanisms that they’re putting in place. My view is that if it’s currently against the law and people make the decision to violate the law then they must expect consequences.

And in this case you would say that with Project Claudia the consequences were measured properly.

Well I’ve explained to you, we didn’t keep people in custody as we normally would. We didn’t arrest individual users, we didn’t do anything to affect the ability of medical marijuana patients to get their product, so yes I would.
———————————————————————————————————————–

And there you have it. Agree or disagree that is their standpoint.

As dispensaries reopen after what clearly might be the first of many raids, it’s hard not to admire the conviction of these dispensary owners who feel that they should be allowed to operate in what most would believe is a grey area at best when it comes to the law.

If anyone in the Trudeau Government is listening, the people who are going to look the worst in all of this is you. Allowing police to have carte blanche when it comes enforcing an archaic law, all the while choosing the corporate entity that will ultimately control the flow of our marijuana products, makes the Government look foolish and greedy at the same time.

You may have taken a stance on not decriminalizing, but at the very least when the time comes for legalization, dispensaries can and must be a part of this mix. If you have any respect for the intelligence of Canadians whatsoever, you will allow them to exist albeit with heavy regulation, and let the Canadian buyer make their own decisions on what products are available to them. We are smarter than you think we are.