What the hell was that all about?

It’s a question you might have asked yourself after Police Chief Mark Saunders’ news conference Friday, which was hijacked by a couple of activists whose persistent questioning and arguing left virtually no room for Saunders to answer, for minutes on end. The journalists in attendance were left to stand around waiting for a chance to get actual information, and the chief was left standing as the event drifted along, to seemingly no purpose.

Of course, the same question about Thursday’s massive co-ordinated raids on 43 unlicensed medical marijuana dispensaries — the subject of the news conference — was also left without a satisfying answer. What the hell was that all about?

The chief and his lead drug detective at the conference were all about numbers: 43 search warrants executed, 90 people arrested, more than 200 charges laid, $160,000 in cash seized, plus 269 kilos of pot, 24 kilos of hash, 30 kilos of resin, and so on, right along to 142 kilos of cookies baked with cannabis in them.

This was clearly a massive deployment of police resources, executing 43 near-simultaneous raids. By contrast, the famous Project Traveller guns-and-gangs raids in 2013 — which turned up more than 40 guns — saw fewer than half as many people arrested, on four fewer warrants. The raids on Malvern gang members in 2004, described then as the largest anti-gang operation in Toronto history, saw 65 arrests.

So this operation was bigger than those. But in those cases, in addition to drugs, the arrests were targeting people police claimed were violent gang members, with the guns seized in the raids as evidence.

In this one, Project Claudia? Well, in this case, there were 72 kilos of chocolate seized.

By all accounts, the parties were guilty, essentially, of a licensing and zoning failure.

Medical marijuana is legal in Canada, but only certain licensed suppliers are able to sell it, and then only by mail — neither storefronts nor advertising are allowed. This is inconvenient for both those who — as their doctors have certified by writing prescriptions and Canadian courts have recognized — suffer unnecessarily without pot, and those who try to provide it.

The larger context is that one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s highest profile campaign promises was to legalize and regulate marijuana sales, not just for those with medical prescriptions, but for recreational adult users. So we might expect impending changes to the law.

The legal status and planned changes, it seems to me, recognize the blatantly obvious reality that whatever the health risks of broader marijuana use (balanced by the therapeutic benefits of some uses), it poses no significant public safety threat that requires criminal prohibition and enforcement. And indeed, Chief Saunders did not claim any public safety justification for the raids, instead citing the possible health risk of products with unknown strength, in which the THC level can vary. Further, we learned during the news conference, there had been neighbour complaints about the dispensaries, in some cases petitions with more than 50 names on them.

One assumes those satisfied dozens of petitioners, now that the reefer boutiques have been shuttered, can go back to filing complaints about uncut grass and proposed third-storey additions and the other petty nonsense complainy neighbours get agitated about. Bully for them.

But was anyone, anywhere, made safer by these raids? Almost certainly not.

If anything, this will drive at least some of the trade in marijuana back into the street market, where THC levels are also unregulated, but with the added risks associated with street drug dealing — the ones those other big gun-and-gang raids of the type I mentioned before are meant to target.

Those 90 people arrested — who Saunders seemed to emphasize were not dangerous criminals in any conventional sense, by pointing out how the raids had been designed specifically so they were quickly processed and released — will now face the trauma of arrest, the expense of defending themselves, and will have criminal arrest (and possibly conviction) records that they carry with them as they try to get jobs, cross borders, and so on. Life is suddenly more dangerous and more difficult for most everyone involved.

To deal with a few points far too quickly: the war on drugs, on the whole, is an epic disaster and threat to public safety, and should be abandoned; the legal situation of marijuana dispensing is far from as clear-cut as we’re being told, because courts have consistently ruled that “the government cannot prevent reasonable access to medical marijuana,” as lawyer Dan Stein pointed out in a blog post; and, notwithstanding those rulings, the dispensaries involved were well aware they were operating in a potentially dangerous legal grey area, outside existing regulations and licensing requirements.

In fact, one gets the impression that last point is one reason such large numbers had sprung up so quickly. As the government prepares to bring in a new regime for how legal marijuana is regulated, pot store owners want to stake their claim to a business model to ensure they have a chance of being part of the new regime.

Such a “disruptive” business approach carries risks, and warnings from city hall this week that they should shut down should have made those risks clear.

But it’s also true that the last company to take such an approach in the face of licensing requirements they didn’t like was Uber, who, rather than having its owners and drivers raided and arrested on a large scale, was rewarded with rule changes allowing the service to operate legally.

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In a city where routine petty law-breaking that actually endangers people (parking in bike lanes, say) is routinely ignored by police, and where distressing levels of serious law-breaking at the other end of the spectrum (the rate of gun violence this year, for instance) is so far not being contained by police, the question is: Why did the police department and the city decide that these were the infractions they wanted to target with a massive crackdown operation? What the hell is this really all about?

The answer still isn’t clear.