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“I knew it was a risk,” said Joe, who declined to give his last name. “It’s something I believe in, that I’m passionate about.” Joe, 33, said he smoked pot to get high when he was younger, but now self-medicates with various strains to control his crippling depression and ease the pain of arthritis.

Joe said he was alone in the back room, where the cannabis is stored, when a police officer in a black balaclava came through the door. “In half a second, they had me in handcuffs.”

Photo by Jacquie Miller / Postmedia

“(Police) were very respectful and courteous. They actually talked to me like a person, not a criminal. I was quite impressed with that.”

Joe said he was charged with four counts of drug trafficking and one count of possessing the proceeds of crime. He was held for about eight hours at police headquarters. The man in the cell next door had been picked up in a raid on Vital Medicinals, he said. That shop, on Bank Street near Heron Road, opened earlier this summer.

A staffer at Vital Medicinals confirmed there had been a raid and that one person was arrested. The store re-opened Thursday.

The third raid was at Lifeline Medicinals on Rideau Street. One of the two staffers taken into custody during the Thursday morning raid was back behind the counter Saturday, carefully counting out piles of bills.

The man said he had been charged with drug trafficking, but the conditions of his release did not prevent him from going back to work. He declined to give his name.

Police confiscated all the weed, cannabis concentrates and cookies at the shop, said Tia, a Lifeline staffer who arrived soon after the raid began. There must have been more merchandise readily available because Tia was inside the locked store the same afternoon, contemplating whether to reopen that day or wait in case the police came back. The shop reopened Friday.