Indopedia All Things Marijuana
For cops looking to find drugs they can’t see, super-smelling dogs trained to detect narcotics are often the second group of officers on the scene, alerting the boys in blue to possible narcotics and giving them probable cause to search a vehicle, school locker, or travel luggage. But with cannabis legal in some form or fashion in over half the country, and dogs unable to distinguish between the drugs they’re sniffing, police are having a hard time taking cues from their pet partners.
A Colorado Court of Appeals ruling earlier this month dismissed a 2015 search and arrest in Moffat County, CO where a drug-sniffing dog alerted local cops of methamphetamine and paraphernalia. Because the cops couldn’t know if the dog was smelling illegal meth or legal weed, the Court of Appeals threw out the case and set a new precedent for valid searches in states with legal weed.
The ruling has left police departments around Colorado and other legal weed states posed with an immediate dilemma; find new dogs that don’t smell weed, retrain existing canine cops to forget how to smell weed, or risk having all dog initiated searches thrown out in court. But for one Colorado County, a…
