Some drug-sniffing dogs edged out by marijuana legalization

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, Colorado, Tulo, a Labrador retriever, has helped with more than 170 arrests. But one of his 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.’ 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.”

“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.”

Older canine workers across the U.S. and Canada are being eased out of the labor force. In many places that have legalized the drug, most new canine recruits are no longer are being trained to sniff out pot. And even departments in states where marijuana remains verboten are hedging their bets.

In Colorado, an appeals court further threw the future of marijuana-sniffing dogs into doubt. The court overturned a methamphetamine conviction on the grounds that the dog who had alerted the police to the possibility of a drug was trained on marijuana, rendering the subsequent discovery of meth invalid. The case is headed for the state’s Supreme Court.