June 1, 2013

"Wash. State Police Dogs Must Unlearn How To Smell Pot."

Headline at Talking Points Memo.

If you read the article you'll see it's a lot more complicated than that. For one thing, the new law only decriminalizes the personal possession of marijuana and only up to one ounce. How do you detect the remaining marijuana crimes? Yet it seems that the best approach is to have a dog that doesn't alert on smelling marijuana, so that it's easier to show probable cause and get a warrant to search for the drugs other than marijuana.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Wait a bit longer and they can forget the skill entirely I hope.

Rabel said...

Speaking of dogs, a photo update on the St. Bernard pup (Abby?) would be appreciated.

Hagar said...

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, ...

edutcher said...

Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out.

sinz52 said...

"new law only decriminalizes the personal possession of marijuana and only up to one ounce. How do you detect the remaining marijuana crimes? "

Get rid of the dogs and let the human cops sniff out the marijuana themselves. Human sense of smell is worse than canine sense of smell, so the cops will only be able to sniff out the really big caches.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Check out Joe Buck's fungus on Fox.

Thomas said...

The State of Washington isn't prevented from enforcing federal law. I'm baffled at how someone would think a judge would fail to find probable cause because the crime suspected is only a federal crime, not a state crime.

Aridog said...

Okay. Nonsense is nonsense. With many years of training dogs under my belt, I agree with the dog trainer in the article:

Helfers said departments who abandoned pot training are having a “knee-jerk” reaction. He said they may miss actual crimes being committed.

Unknown said...

Having an illegal amount of marihuana is probably one of the better indications of any other drug activity.
It's like not profiling for young Arab males on an airplane. Politically sensitive, but stupid.

Unknown said...

My iPad rejects marijuana.

bagoh20 said...

We've had legalized pot here In L.A. for a number of years now, and I live on the west side where it is the most prevalent and open. After all that experience with it a few things are now confirmed:

1) While the legal stuff certainly helps quite a few people with valid medical issues, the legal channel is used at least half the time for recreational use.
2) There is still plenty of illegal traffic, but it has been reduced quite a bit.
3) The legalization hasn't really created any substantial problems, beyond the discomfort some people feel about it being openly advertised in public.

I'd say it's a net plus for the community, when I consider the often very substantial benefit to those who do get medical relief, but also the recreational users, who will use it anyway, doing the transactions openly and safely in a store rather than with a car full of shady strangers in a dark parking lot. It keeps the violent elements of our society more distant from the peaceful circles.

I know plenty of people who do, did, no longer do, or never did smoke pot, but I don't know a single recreational user who started because it became legal. I'm sure there are a few, but that argument against legalization seems refuted by the experience.