Indopedia All Things Marijuana
Colorado’s new breed of police dogs are now being trained to disregard the smell of legal marijuana.
The city of Rifle’s police department has introduced two new drug-sniffing dogs that won’t respond when smelling marijuana, reports the Post Independent.
The two puppies, known as Jax and Makai, will be trained for Rifle’s K-9 unit in order to replace current police dogs that are conditioned to sniff out pot. The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled in July that dogs trained to search for marijuana won’t have legal probable cause when alerting to drugs in general.
“Dogs that can sniff for marijuana get called into question more in court and can make things more difficult,” Officer Garrett Duncan told the Post Independent.
The new 420-friendly pups were introduced thanks to fundraising by local 12-year-old Carter Fulk, who hopes to be a cop in the future.
As cannabis law reform spreads throughout the U.S., several pot-sniffing dogs have been retired in states with legal access, such as Oregon.
“It’s much harder to retrain a dog than it is to train them for the first time,” said Sgt. D.J. Graham in a 2015…
