Customs targetted doctors, court hears
(CNS): Customs and Border Control targetted Doctors Express to seize legal cannabis stocks last year after the facility circulated an advert announcing the arrival of the medicine through vaporization. Their attorney, James Austin-Smith, accused customs of planning the raid on the clinic, messing it up and then trying to cover it up, all because the department’s management did not believe this system of delivery should be legal.
As he questioned a customs officer during the ongoing judicial review on Wednesday, Austin-Smith demonstrated to the court that the orders had come from the top of customs, despite the absence of any legal justification for what transpired.
CBC Officer Holly Schneider, who was responsible for securing what she admitted was an unnecessary and defective warrant to conduct the raid, appeared as a live witness during the second week of the trial. But it emerged that she had been directed to get the warrant, which she had not written or even read properly, signed by a justice of the peace by senior officers just hours after a stop notice had been issued by the chief medical officer, apparently as a result of pressure from customs.
She admitted that the warrant had the incorrect section of the Misuse of Drugs Law cited and the wrong offence, and offered few details relating to the actual circumstances. The officer claimed she had explained things to the JP verbally but there are no notes of this, nor did Schneider indicate this to be the case in any written affidavits supplied in the case over the last year. She made a claim from the witness stand for the first time Wednesday that she had told the Attorney General’s Chambers.
It became clear during the day’s questioning that the bust and subsequent seizure was a planned and targetted effort that arose out of what appears to have been the beliefs of management at customs and the director of CBC.
Austin-Smith quizzed Schneider about the communications and meetings in the immediate aftermath of the doctors’ advert being circulated that customs had with the Health Practitioners Commission, the chief medical officer and others. This all lead to the inevitable conclusion that it was customs that had pressed for a notice to stop the dispensation of the vaporized medical cannabis, without lawful grounds, but merely because they believed it should not be legal, as set out in various emails.
Austin-Smith set out the chain of events that led to the justice of the peace signing a defective warrant while not in possession of all the facts, and an alarming raid by 15 officers on a medical emergency centre to seize lawfully held and imported medicines.
Throughout the day’s proceedings, as more information emerged about the poor conduct of all those involved, the judge again gave the crown’s attorney several opportunities to re-think the case. He pressed Nigel Gayle, who is representing the AG’s chambers to consider all that was emerging. He urged him to take seriously the conflicts and contradictions in his witnesses’ testimony and the evidence, as well as what he said was “the shambles” surrounding the acquisition and execution of the warrant.
The case continues.
