Drug Crimes Attorney in Orange County
Criminal defense attorney and former Orange County Deputy District Attorney. The case results and legal analysis on this page are drawn from his own Orange County drug cases.
A possession charge in Orange County is not the charge most people think it is
If you have two or more prior drug convictions, simple possession is no longer a misdemeanor in California. Proposition 36, passed in 2024, created the treatment-mandated felony under Health and Safety Code 11395, and it does not matter whether those priors were for sales, for possession for sale, or for simple possession. It also does not matter how much you had. Any usable quantity is enough.
Orange County is enforcing that harder than almost anywhere else in the state. According to the Public Policy Institute of California’s analysis of early Prop 36 filings, Orange County files these cases at roughly 19 per 100,000 residents, among the highest rates in California, and more than 80 percent of Orange County’s Prop 36 filings are drug cases rather than theft cases. San Francisco files at about a tenth of our rate for the same conduct.
We are The Law Offices of Bryan R. Kazarian, a criminal defense firm in Santa Ana. Here is what Bryan Kazarian is seeing on these cases right now:
The Orange County District Attorney is aggressively pursuing and filing charges against people with simple possession of drugs, be it one or two grams, that do not rise to the level of possession for sale. In that case the Orange County DA is able to charge what would have been a misdemeanor as a felony.
The rest of this page is about what can be done about that, and about the treatment and diversion routes that end in a dismissal. None of those routes open by themselves.
Arrested but not charged yet?
Call now. Free and confidential.
Tell us where you were arrested and whether you have any prior drug convictions. Those two answers decide which courthouse your case lands in and how serious the charge can get. If your case has not been filed yet, that window is when the charging decision can still be influenced, and it is when getting into treatment does the most work.
Available 24/7. Speaking with us costs nothing and does not commit you to hiring us. Se habla español.
The work that happens before your first court date
Most drug defense pages describe what happens in court. The part that decides these cases usually happens before anyone sets foot in a courtroom.
Bryan’s description of the difference:
A less experienced attorney would have just signed the contract, taken his money, set the arraignment, and then waited for the case to appear in court before taking any actions.
- Sign the retainer
- Calendar the arraignment
- Wait for the case to be filed
- Show up and start negotiating
- Contacted the DA and monitored the case before it was filed
- Detox, then residential, then intensive outpatient
- Built the record: a user, not a dealer
- Delivered it before the DA's position hardened
Result: felony possession for sale of methamphetamine reduced to a misdemeanor simple possession. A client who arrives at arraignment having done nothing since his arrest is asking the prosecutor to take his word for it.
Diversion is real. It is also never automatic.
There are five doors out of a drug case in Orange County that end with the charge dismissed rather than convicted. Which ones are open to you depends almost entirely on your record, and whether you get through one depends on something else.
Bryan, on that second part:
Who gets in and who doesn't get in depends on who your defense attorney is, how well the motion is written, and how well he's able to present his case to the DA, so that the DA either agrees to let them in or disputes it.
The DA will usually fight or disagree with any case where they believe the public is in danger, or the person is not really a suitable candidate based on a number of factors.
PC 1000 drug diversion
Penal Code 1000 is the first door people ask about, and it is the one with the hardest gate.
What disqualifies you: any prior drug conviction at all. Bryan’s words: if the client has any prior drug charges or felony charges, they are disqualified. This is not a program you talk your way into with a bad record. It is built for people who do not have one.
If you qualify and you complete it, the case is dismissed and sealed.
Drug court
Drug court is a collaborative court. Your case is physically removed from the criminal courtroom and moved into the drug court calendar. You are evaluated, and if you are accepted, you plead guilty and enter treatment. Complete it and the case is dismissed.
Orange County runs its Adult Drug Court out of the Community Court at 909 N. Main Street in Santa Ana, not out of the justice center your case started in. The court sets a minimum of 18 months across a five-phase program, with intensive probation supervision, counseling, drug testing, and residential treatment where it is needed. Orange County also runs a separate Proposition 36 treatment program out of the same building.
Understand what you are agreeing to. You plead guilty to get in. That is a real decision with real consequences if you do not finish, and it is worth making with counsel rather than at a podium.
Mental health diversion, PC 1001.36
This is the door almost nobody writes about on a drug case, and for a lot of clients it fits better than the drug programs do.
Penal Code 1001.36 requires three things: that there was a crime, that the defendant suffered from a mental illness, and that the illness was a contributing factor to the crime.
- Available on misdemeanors and felonies, unlike most of the alternatives.
- One year of diversion on a misdemeanor. Two years on a felony.
- During diversion the client receives drug treatment plus the mental health counseling the case actually calls for.
- On completion the case is dismissed and sealed.
The reason this matters in a drug case is that the underlying condition and the substance use are frequently the same problem seen from two directions, and 1001.36 is the only route that treats it that way.
Military diversion, PC 1001.80
Penal Code 1001.80 covers current and former members of the military who are suffering trauma or a mental health condition as a result of their service.
- Misdemeanors only. It cannot be used on a felony.
- Typically runs one year to 18 months.
Judicial diversion, PC 1001.95
Penal Code 1001.95 lets a judge grant diversion on a misdemeanor over the prosecutor’s objection. On drug cases this is often the last door available, and it is the one we use on Prop 36 cases that have been argued back down to a misdemeanor.
What we do with a Prop 36 felony
The structural problem with a treatment-mandated felony is built into it. To be charged with one you have to have two or more priors, and having those priors is exactly what closes off PC 1000 and most of the alternatives. The charge disqualifies you from the easy remedies by definition.
There are two things we work toward on these cases.
Get it reduced back to a misdemeanor. This is the main fight, and it is the same work described further up this page: mitigation, treatment, and a case presented to the district attorney before the DA’s position has hardened. Reducing a felony is a route with its own mechanics, and we have written separately about how a felony gets reduced to a misdemeanor in California.
In some cases, reduce it and then divert it. Bryan describes this as available in extraordinary circumstances: the case comes down to a misdemeanor and then goes into judicial diversion under PC 1001.95, which ends in a dismissal rather than a conviction.
One thing worth knowing if your priors are old. California’s SB 180 removed a sentencing enhancement that used to attach to prior drug sales convictions, and old priors do not always carry the weight people assume they do. We covered that in letting the past go, drug priors after SB 180.
Two cases
Arrested for sales, argued down to a user
Charged with possession for sale of a controlled substance, methamphetamine. He was not only selling. He was using, heavily, and he came to us with no treatment history at all.
We did not wait for the case to be filed. We contacted the district attorney's office and monitored the case while the charging decision was still being made. At the same time we placed him in treatment: detox first, because his dependency was severe enough to need it, then a short residential program, which stepped down into an intensive outpatient program.
That sequence does three things at once. It gets the client clean, which is the only thing that stops the next case. It shows the court the problem is being brought under control, which changes the bail posture. And it is the evidence behind the argument that he is a user rather than a dealer, which is the entire distance between possession for sale and simple possession.
What the argument turned on: he was not asking the district attorney to take his word for it. He was three programs deep before the charging decision was made.
A felony sales conviction
- Felony conviction for possession for sale
- Custody exposure, with no treatment alternative attached
- No access to PC 1000 diversion, which excludes sales charges
- Recorded as a dealer, not a person with a dependency
- A prior that escalates every future drug case he ever picks up
Reduced to misdemeanor simple possession
- Felony possession for sale off the table
- Charged as a user, not a dealer
- Detox, short residential, then intensive outpatient, all under way before filing
- Bail posture improved by documented treatment, not promises
- A dependency actually being treated, not deferred to sentencing
Priors, mandatory jail, and a felony that went away after a year
A man who used to live in Orange County, now living in Northern California, came to us with prior possession-for-sale convictions on his record. Those priors carried mandatory jail time, and that was the fact sitting on top of everything else in the case.
What changed it was not an argument about the evidence. It was many pretrial hearings, long negotiation with the district attorney, and a mitigation package showing who he had become: gainfully employed in construction, settled, and a materially different person from the one in the old file.
The structure we reached- The district attorney added a misdemeanor count to the case.
- He pled guilty to both the misdemeanor and the felony possession for sale.
- Sentencing was continued out one full year with no sentence imposed.
- If he picked up no new law violations in that year, he would be sentenced on the misdemeanor only, to time served plus one year of informal probation, and the felony possession for sale would be dismissed.
He kept it clean. The felony went away. Nothing about the evidence changed between the first hearing and the last one. What changed was how much the district attorney knew about the man in front of him.
Mandatory jail time because of the priors
- A second felony sales conviction on his record
- Custody time the priors made mandatory, not discretionary
- Disqualified from PC 1000, which requires a clean drug record
- A job and a life in another county, both interrupted
- Formal probation supervision on top of the custody term
Felony dismissed, misdemeanor only
- Felony possession for sale dismissed after one clean year
- Sentenced on the misdemeanor only
- Time served, no new custody
- One year of informal probation, not formal supervision
- Kept his job in construction throughout
More outcomes are on our case results page.
Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome in any other case. Every drug case is decided on its own facts.
Bryan on why that was available at all:
It was only because of the mitigation we worked on with our client, got it over to the district attorney, and made sure the district attorney was cognizant and aware of all of the mitigating factors our client has overcome.
More outcomes are on our case results page.
Where your case goes, and where treatment happens
Orange County has four adult criminal courthouses, and which one your case lands in is decided by the arresting agency and where the arrest happened, not by where you live:
- Central Justice Center, 700 Civic Center Drive West, Santa Ana
- Harbor Justice Center, 4601 Jamboree Road, Newport Beach
- West Justice Center, 8141 13th Street, Westminster
- North Justice Center, 1275 N. Berkeley Avenue, Fullerton
There is a fifth building that matters on drug cases and does not appear on most attorney websites. The Community Court at 909 N. Main Street in Santa Ana is where Orange County’s collaborative courts sit: Adult Drug Court, the Proposition 36 treatment program, mental health diversion, military diversion, and Veterans Treatment Court. The two latter programs may also be heard in an assigned department at the Central Justice Center at 700 Civic Center Drive West in Santa Ana. If your case moves into one of those programs, that is the building you will be reporting to, and the judge supervising your progress is not the judge who was handling your criminal case.
We appear in all four justice centers and in the collaborative courts. Our office is in Santa Ana, a few minutes from both Central and the Community Court, and we handle cases across central Orange County and the rest of the county.
What you did in the first 48 hours
People usually call the day after an arrest, holding a slip of paper with a court date on it, asking what to do next.
What to do: call or come in and sit down for an interview.
What to stop doing right now, in Bryan’s words:
Stop doing everything else that they're doing at the current moment, including searching the internet, talking to other people, or anything about their case, except talking to a qualified defense attorney who knows exactly what's going on.
Anytime they speak to another person other than their lawyer, it could always be used against them, whether it's a friend, a mother, a father, or anybody else.
And people make the case worse after the arrest by continuing to use, which is both a health problem and a legal one.
The four things that are hardest to unwind
These are the ones we see most often, done before anyone called a lawyer:
- Consenting to a search of your person or your car.
- Talking to police on audio or video.
- Admitting you possessed the drugs.
- Texting someone afterward and admitting you had them.
Here is the part other pages will not tell you, because it is less dramatic than a promise:
Some of these things are not easily reversible.However, they're not always fatal.
Depending on the circumstances and your record, an illegal search can be suppressed, audio or video can be suppressed or even a Miranda problem, or the whole issue can be routed around by dispositioning the case toward one of the diversion programs above. A bad statement is a problem to be solved, not the end of the case. It is also the reason to stop talking now rather than after the next conversation.
We have written more on what you should and should not do when arrested, and if someone you know is still in custody, on what to do if a loved one is in custody at the Orange County jail.
What everyone gets wrong
There is a version of drug defense advice that circulates online and, according to Bryan, comes out of some law offices too. It goes like this: possession is just a misdemeanor now, you will automatically get diversion, you do not really need a lawyer, and when you finish the program the arrest disappears on its own.
It is wrong in three places, and the three failures compound.
Possession is not always a misdemeanor. Not with two priors, under Prop 36. Not when it is charged as possession for sale. The assumption that Prop 47 permanently settled this stopped being safe in 2024, and it is least safe in this county.
Diversion is never automatic. Not PC 1000, not 1001.95, not military, not mental health. Bryan’s position:
It is my opinion that you need a lawyer to lobby for you, to present all the mitigating factors, to get you into that diversionary process.
Every one of those programs has a gate, and on the other side of that gate is a prosecutor whose job includes objecting.
On the record, the myth is closer to right than most people expect, but only if you got through the gate. PC 1000, PC 1001.95, military diversion, and mental health diversion under 1001.36 do end with the case dismissed and sealed, and the arrest goes with it. That is a real outcome. It is just not one that arrives by itself, and it is not what happens if you plead guilty at arraignment to get the day over with.
For what a sealed or dismissed record actually means afterward, see expungement or seal and destroy, different tools for different jobs.
If you are not a US citizen
A drug conviction is one of the few categories of criminal case where the immigration consequence can be more severe than the sentence. This is not a section to skim if it applies to you, and it is a reason to raise your status with your attorney at the first meeting rather than after a plea is entered.
We have written on what happens when a DACA recipient is charged with a drug offense and on crimes that may legally bar you from DACA eligibility.
Common questions
The answers below are what we tell people who call us. If your question is not here, ask it on the phone. It costs nothing.
The charge
Is simple drug possession a felony or a misdemeanor in California?
Usually a misdemeanor under Health and Safety Code 11350, which is where Prop 47 left it in 2014. But with two or more prior drug convictions it can be charged as a felony under Health and Safety Code 11395, the treatment-mandated felony created by Prop 36 in 2024. Orange County is filing those aggressively.
Do my priors have to be for the same drug or the same offense?
No. The priors can be possession for sale, sales, or simple possession. Any combination of two qualifying prior convictions can trigger it.
How small an amount of drugs can be charged?
Any usable quantity. There is no threshold that keeps you out of it once the priors are there. The one and two gram cases are the ones we are seeing filed as felonies in Orange County.
Diversion and your record
Can I get into PC 1000 drug diversion if I have a prior?
No. Penal Code 1000 requires a clean drug record. A prior drug charge or a prior felony disqualifies you, which is why the other programs matter so much for people who do not qualify.
Does completing a diversion program clear my record?
PC 1000, PC 1001.95, military diversion, and mental health diversion under PC 1001.36 end with the case dismissed and sealed, and the arrest sealed with it.
Drug court ends in dismissal after you complete the program, but you plead guilty to enter it. That is a real decision with real consequences if you do not finish, and it is worth making with counsel rather than at a podium.
How long is Orange County drug court?
The court sets a minimum of 18 months across five phases, run out of the Community Court on North Main Street in Santa Ana. It includes intensive probation supervision, counseling, drug testing, and residential treatment where it is needed. The full list of programs is on the Orange County Superior Court's collaborative courts page.
Where your case goes, and what you already did
Which Orange County courthouse will my case be in?
Central, Harbor, West, or North, decided by the arresting agency and where the arrest happened, not by where you live. If your case moves into drug court or a diversion program, that part happens at the Community Court in Santa Ana, and the judge supervising your progress is not the judge who was handling your criminal case.
I already talked to the police. Is my case over?
No. Some of these things are not easily reversible, but they are not always fatal. Statements can be suppressed for a Miranda problem, searches can be challenged, and some cases get routed toward diversion in a way that makes the statement beside the point.
It is still the reason to stop talking now rather than after the next conversation. See what you should and should not do when arrested.
Not sure which of these applies to you? Tell us where you were arrested and whether you have any prior drug convictions. Those two answers usually settle it in one conversation.
Free case evaluationWhat happens when you call
You will speak with someone about what you were charged with, what your record looks like, and which of the doors above is actually open to you. That last part is the answer most people are calling for, and it is usually answerable in one conversation.
If treatment is going to be part of the strategy, we would rather start arranging it this week than after your arraignment. On the case described at the top of this page, that timing is the entire reason the outcome was a misdemeanor.
Available 24/7. Speaking with us costs nothing and does not commit you to hiring us. Se habla español.
The Law Offices of Bryan R. Kazarian, Santa Ana, serving all of Orange County. We appear in the Central, Harbor, West and North justice centers and in the county's collaborative courts.
EXPERIENCED.
AGGRESSIVE.
CAPABLE.
AGGRESSIVE.
CAPABLE.
EXPERIENCED.
AGGRESSIVE.
CAPABLE.
AGGRESSIVE.
CAPABLE.
What Makes Our Firm Different
The criminal defense attorney you hire to represent you is one of the most important decisions you will make.
Here are the values that guide our services:
- Experienced: Our firm has over 23 years of experience, so you can feel confident you will receive quality legal counsel.
- Client-Centered: We put our clients first. Drawing on that belief, and our knowledge of criminal law, we find solutions that best meet our clients’ individual needs.
- Superior Results: Regardless the legal matter, we work tirelessly to achieve exceptional outcomes for our clients.
- Trusted Advice: To guide you through this difficult time in your life, we provide sophisticated legal advice you can trust.
23+ YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
Criminal Defense Practice Areas
We’re proud of the life-changing results we’ve achieved with our clients. Your honest reviews help other people in crisis find the experienced legal representation they need. If we’ve helped protect your future, we encourage you to share your experience through online reviews.
“Bryan is a miracle worker, his reputation goes beyond making slim to nothing chances, almost impossible… Possible. I highly recommend Bryan for any obstacle or unfortunate bind you get yourself into. You won’t regret it…”
TUONG VY L.
“I wouldn’t be able to see these beautiful surroundings that I am experiencing now if I did not have my freedom, I owe that to you Mr. Kazarian and for that I am eternally grateful.”
M.L.
“Bryan helped me navigate a tough case, and got me the best deal we could manage all while avoiding a bunch of headache and any jail time.”
RYAN T.
Frequently Asked Questions
These terms are used interchangeably to describe attorneys who defend people accused of crimes. Both criminal lawyers and defense attorneys provide the same services – representing clients facing criminal charges and protecting their legal rights throughout the legal process.
You should contact a criminal defense lawyer immediately after any arrest or if you learn you’re under investigation. Getting a criminal defense lawyer early can help protect your rights, potentially prevent charges from being filed, and ensure you don’t inadvertently harm your case by speaking without representation.
A criminal justice attorney is a broad term including prosecutors, public defenders, and private defense attorneys. A criminal defense attorney specifically represents accused individuals. Understanding the difference between criminal justice and defense attorneys helps you choose the right legal representation for your situation.
Yes, the long-term consequences of a criminal conviction far outweigh attorney fees. A conviction can result in lost employment opportunities, damaged reputation, and potential jail time. Why criminal defense attorneys are worth the investment becomes clear when you consider the lifetime impact of a criminal record.
Criminal defense attorneys defend people accused of crimes, not necessarily criminals. Many clients are law-abiding citizens who made mistakes or are wrongly accused. How criminal defense attorneys protect the innocent is a fundamental part of ensuring everyone receives fair treatment under the law.
