Marijuana Legalization Threatens These Dogs' Collars

Drug-sniffing dogs that are trained to detect marijuana are complicating searches where pot has been legalized. That’s forcing some into early retirement.

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Officer Tulo will turn in his badge in January, forced into early retirement by the country’s waning war on weed.

In his eight years with the Police Department of Rifle, Colo., Tulo, a yellow Labrador retriever, has helped with more than 170 arrests in the town of 9,000. But one of his old-fashioned skills hasn’t just fallen out of demand since the state legalized marijuana, it has become a liability: State court rulings mean that Tulo’s keen nose for pot imperils his work on other drug cases.

As states and cities loosen their drug laws, the highly trained dogs their police departments use to sniff out narcotics can’t always be counted on to smell the right thing.

“A dog can’t tell you, ‘Hey, I smell marijuana’ or ‘I smell meth,’” said Tommy Klein, Rifle’s police chief. “They have the same behavior for any drug that they’ve been trained on. If Tulo were to alert on a car, we no longer have probable cause for a search based on his alert alone.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/business/marijuana-legalization-police-dogs.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage