Sending police to shut down pot shops is a “blunt instrument” in the face of the widespread social disobedience that has propelled hundreds of the illegal businesses to open across Canada, says Osgoode Hall Law School professor Alan Young.



“The criminal law is always an ineffective way to make a change in a community,” said Young, a specialist in marijuana law. “It’s very slow, ponderous, and by the time you get a result, the legal landscape may have changed.”



Ottawa city councillors and merchant groups are debating what to do about the illegal marijuana dispensaries opening in town. There have been calls for police to enforce the drug trafficking laws and shut them down. Everyone is looking closely at what’s happening in other Canadian cities, especially the pot hot spots of Toronto and Vancouver.



In Toronto, police cracked down after dozens of dispensaries sprang up this spring. Since late May, police and bylaw officials have raided 47 dispensaries, arresting more than 90 people and charging them with either drug trafficking, benefitting from the proceeds of crime or zoning infractions.



It doesn’t appear to have quelled the tide. Many of the shops re-opened, and new ones popped up. There are now about 100 dispensaries in Toronto, said Michael McLellan, the spokesperson for a coalition of Toronto dispensaries. That’s slightly more than before the raids, he said. The vast majority are helping medical marijuana patients, he said. Their operators “believe strongly in what they are doing, that what they are doing is right, that they are helping people.”



The raids are a waste of taxpayers’ money, said McLellan.



Young, who helped set up a couple of the first medical marijuana dispensaries in Toronto 15 years ago, said they operated quietly “under the radar.” Toronto officials felt compelled to act this spring because of the sudden proliferation of shops, he said.



“As we move toward legalization, and people feel like the law has already lost all its moral force, a lot of people jumped the gun, and created a dispensary, some of them still dedicated toward the care of sick people, but many of them were just about selling marijuana to whoever would come through.”



Did police raids solve the problem? “Not really,” he said. “And now we’ve encumbered the criminal justice system with dozens and dozens of criminal charges that I don’t believe there is any real political will to prosecute.



“I believe that over time many of these charges will just disappear.”



Dispensaries that can prove they are genuinely helping the sick are operating in a “grey zone” that may provide them a measure of legal protection, he said.



“They don’t have a legal seal of approval from the federal government, but they have certain protections under the Charter of Rights that we’ve successfully litigated over the last 15 years that there must be reasonable access to this medicine.”



The federal government is now rewriting its medical marijuana regulations after a court ruled they violated the Charter. Legislation to legalize and “strictly regulate” the sale of recreational marijuana is expected in the fall of 2017.



Ottawa councillors are also discussing the approach taken by Vancouver. For the most part, police stood by as dispensaries popped up, saying shutting them down was not a priority. But the city stepped in to control the illegal shops in June 2015 with licensing and zoning bylaws.