By Benjie Cooper
IG: @nuglifenews
YouTube: Lucid’s Vlog
A Toronto Police Officer who ate cannabis candy after a raid earlier this year has pleaded guilty this week to charges of attempting to obstruct justice and breach of trust.
Thirty-six-year-old Toronto Police Officer Vittorio Dominelli and partner 35-year-old partner Jamie Young were part of a team that conducted a raid of the unlicensed Community Cannabis Clinic on January 27.
As the team was going through the dispensary, Dominelli volunteered to get pizza, but he took three cannabis-infused chocolate bars that he had noticed on the floor of the dispensary as he was leaving.
The officer soon began having second thoughts about taking the candy and told Young that he wanted to leave it at the pizza place, but she disagreed.
Young and Dominelli were also assigned to surveil an after-hours bar later the same evening and were at one point discussing legalization and how neither of them had tried marijuana. The officers decided to each eat half of one of the stolen chocolate bars, assuming that the effects would be mild.
“After about twenty minutes, the chocolates hit me suddenly like a ton of bricks…I believed I was going to pass out,” said Dominelli in his statement. “I started to think that the chocolate may have been laced with something because it seemed impossible that a marijuana product would have such a powerful effect.”
After some time had passed, Dominelli feared he was dying so he asked Young to radio for assistance. Young refused so he made the call himself, requesting an ambulance.
An officer responding to the scene slipped on a patch of ice and sustained a severe head injury which has resulted in considerable speech and vision difficulties and prevented her from returning to work in the months since the incident.
Dominelli, who has served forty hours of community service so far, resigned from the police force on Thursday, looking to resolve the matter as quickly as possible.
The now-former officer’s lawyer says Dominelli is remorseful, ashamed, and very depressed about the incident.
The prosecution in the case is proposing a conditional community service sentence while the defense is requesting a conditional discharge. Both Young and Dominelli also face four charges of misconduct each.
