Drug Offences: Scheduled Substances

What is charged with possession of a scheduled substance? I can tell you first that a scheduled substance means that it fits within one of the schedules of the CDSA, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. So Schedule one and two are generally the more serious or hard drugs, so an example would be cocaine or another type of, or another opioid. Schedule three and four tend to be the softer drugs and the reason they’re in schedules or part of the reason is there are different penalties and procedures associated with prosecuting each one. So that’s a schedule substance. Now possession is an interesting concept, a lot of people think just because I don’t have, just you know, if I don’t have it in my hand I’m not in possession of it. Well possession essentially consists, in terms of the way the law looks at it, consists of two components, one is knowledge and the other is control, essentially so a lot of people think well you know it was just in my house, if you have control over the premises you can be deemed to be in control of the substance, and that in conjunction with knowledge can land you a, land you in some hot water right, so knowledge, just to clarify, will be you know the bag that I had wasn’t baking powder, I knew indeed that it was cocaine, right. The crown has to prove that you knew what the substance was in the circumstances.