Yost offers state’s help with pot testing
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is trying to get the word out: Recreational marijuana is not legal in Ohio. However, the recent legalization of hemp will make it tough to prosecute simple possession of weed — at least until the end of the year.
Yost called a news conference Tuesday afternoon to clear up what he said was confusion on that issue. He also announced that his office had “scrounged together” $50,000 to assist local police agencies with lab testing in marijuana trafficking cases until the state’s own labs are equipped to do the testing early next year.
Ohio law-enforcement authorities have had difficulty since the passage of Senate Bill 57. It legalized hemp, which is the same genus of plant as marijuana but is legally defined as having no more than 0.3% of its psychoactive molecule, THC. Problem is, state and local police agencies don’t have a way to measure THC content, which prompted Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein last week to announce that his office would stop prosecuting misdemeanor marijuana possession cases.
Yost said machines costing upward of $50,000 apiece have been installed in Bureau of Criminal Investigation labs in London and Bowling Green and a third is being installed at Richfield. But the machines won’t be calibrated and operational until early 2020.
Until then, Yost said, his office won’t provide financial assistance in possession cases but would provide funds for testing in a private lab in cases involving marijuana trafficking, which can end in a prison term.
Ayost was asked about another bit of fallout from hemp legalization. Police dogs are often used to provide probable cause to search vehicles and other private spaces when they “hit” — alert their handlers that they’ve caught the smell of one of several drugs they’ve been trained to detect.
But most police dogs have been trained to detect Yost marijuana and can’t distinguish between it and low-thc hemp. That means police wouldn’t know whether a dog smelled legal hemp or illegal heroin in determining whether to initiate a search.
In response, the State Highway Patrol and the Columbus Division of Police have stopped training new dogs to alert when they smell pot, but it leaves questions about what to do with existing dogs.
Yost said an defense lawyer might use that to challenge a search, but “I think there’s a very good argument that a dog alerting is ... sufficient to warrant law enforcement’s interaction.”