Police departments around the country employ drug sniffing dogs. These dogs can sniff out all manner of drugs from opiates to meth to marijuana. The dogs signal the presence of drugs by barking or sitting or performing some other specified action when they find the location of a drug.
Do these dogs need to be retired or retrained in jurisdictions where marijuana is explicitly legal to own? Is it even possible to retrain a drug sniffing dog to ignore marijuana?
This popped into my head due to another thread asking about K9s and car searches, where the search is justified by the dog indicating the presence of drugs in the car. If that dog is trained to identify marijuana, are they justifying the search by sensing the presence of a legal drug?
Some quick googling suggests that there’s no single rule regarding this. Some states (or at least some jurisdictions) in which marijuana is legal are training new dogs not to alert to it (and/or retiring the old ones that do). OTOH, some are keeping them on since even if it’s legal, there are still cases where possession is illegal (ie underage, too much, open container etc), so they still want to find that.
My WAG is that they’ll eventually phase out that portion of the training, especially as more and more cases end up overturned in court where a search (by a human) is conducted and found something based on the dog alerting to legally possessed pot.
K9 officers are only in service for 6 or 7 years, it shouldn’t take long to cycle them out.
Yes, dogs that alert to marijuana are being retired.
If they alert during a traffic stop and a search is initiated, that search can be thrown out because the officer did not have probable cause to search.
Mostly FYI, but I once attended a lecture by a K9 officer who explained how dogs smell. Dog smell like humans see. A human looking at a pot of stew will see: meat, potatoes, carrots, celery, gravy - very clearly and easy. A dog will see a jumbled grey mess.
However, a dog will smell hidden marijuana as: plastic wrapping, bounty dryer sheets, marijuana, etc. - very clearly and easy. A human will smell a jumbled mess.
Colorado just recently confronted this issue in their Supreme Court (well, back in May). It used to be that if a dog alerted to a car, it was probable cause to search the car for contraband. Colorado, however, recognized that a person has a privacy interest in up to an ounce of weed. Therefore, unless the dog is trained to differentiate amounts (they aren’t), a dog trained to alert on weed may be alerting on legal behavior.
The consequence, as noted, is to retire these dogs. And, now a days, police reports emphasize that the dogs they use are trained to detect drugs other than pot.