PDEA chief: Dogs don’t lie about drugs

Dogs have no reason to lie. That’s how much the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency trusts its K-9 unit. Thus it insists that the magnetic lifters in Cavite contained shabu (meth), similar to those seized in Tondo.

Odel, PDEA’s ace sniffer dog, detected the presence of shabu in four hollow metal lifters. Although human agents found no drugs inside, they are sure shabu had been hidden in them and smuggled into Manila.

“Dogs don’t lie,” PDEA chief Aaron Aquino says. Odel sat twice beside each of the four gadgets, to indicate whiffs of shabu. “Dogs are trained to sit when they pick up the scent,” Aquino says. “We cannot prevent them from sitting or not sitting.”

The process is for the K-9 handler to first walk the dog around the premises, in this case the warehouse that PDEA raided Aug. 9 in General Mariano Alvarez, Cavite. Then the dog is led to the target. Odel sat beside each of the lifters upon scenting drugs. The process is repeated for confirmation. Odel again sat four times, whereupon PDEA raiders concluded that shabu indeed had been sneaked in through the lifters.

Aquino stands pat on the findings. He expounded on it on DWIZ radio show Sapol last Saturday, after testifying Thursday at the House of Reps hearing on the latest large-scale shabu smuggling.

Aquino has no reason to doubt his drug-detecting canine. Odel has sniffed out more than P400 million worth of drugs sneaked in through the Manila International Airport. The Belgian Malinois can sniff out all kinds of prohibited substances: shabu, ecstasy, marijuana, “you name it,” says Aquino. That’s why he personally called in Odel for the Cavite raid.

Two days earlier PDEA agents found shabu inside two magnetic lifters in a cargo container at the Manila International Container Port in Tondo. The contraband, 355 kilos in all worth P4.2 billion, was wrapped in plastic, asbestos fabric, and packing tape. Televised videos of the find led to a tip about the four other lifters in the Cavite warehouse. Raiders estimated that the empty lifters there must have contained double the volume and value of shabu.

Conflict with the Customs bureau ensued. PDEA agents said the shabu had passed through that agency just like 650 kilos of the stuff worth P6.4 billion in 2017. The shabu was hidden inside printing machine cylinders then, sneaked into the Manila piers. Reviewing PDEA’s findings, President Rodrigo Duterte said, as a former state prosecutor, it was “unsubstantiated.”

Customs sought to debunk PDEA findings by citing the latter’s own swab tests of the Cavite lifters. Wiped for traces of shabu, the insides proved negative in lab tests.

But Aquino relies more on canine sniffing and human sighting than routine swab samples. In fact, even swab tests on the insides of the two lifters in Tondo also rated negative, although shabu packs had been taken from them.

That’s because of the multilayered wrappings, Aquino says. The smugglers had made sure the meth was cleanly packed, with not a speck spilling out to the inner walls of the lifters.

Still, despite the long travel time and distance of the contraband, Odel was able to pick up the scent.

To explain the disparity between the canine sniff and swab findings, Aquino uses as example the odorous durian fruit from his and Duterte’s Davao region. Pack a durian carefully and tightly, then put it in your car, and you will not smell anything, he says. But bring it down and have somebody hop in, and he’d ask why the car smells of durian.

More so with dogs, whose sense of smell is 10,000 times more sensitive than humans’, Aquino adds. He believes in K-9 abilities, having operated in such unit at the Philippine National Police.

The shipments to Cavite and Tondo came a month apart from two sources, Malaysia and Taiwan. Still, from observations and past knowledge, PDEA deduces that there was shabu in Cavite as in Tondo.

For one, the magnetic lifters are identical in dimensions, markings, cables, and accessories. More than that, the consignment documents of the Tondo shipment showed that it was to be delivered to Cavite.

Police operatives also note that in the days leading up to the discovery in Cavite, shabu flooded anew into Mega Manila. From nightly police raids and buy-busts, cops were confiscating bigger volumes of shabu – in the hundreds of thousands to the millions of pesos per pusher – from the usual few thousands maximum. This indicates that a large amount of meth had been introduced into the market.

Aquino says that sudden price drops in street prices also indicate a proliferation of shabu. Narco-traffickers do not hoard the stuff like rice cartelists do to force up retail rates. They immediately dispose of the stuff by the tens or hundreds of kilos, lest intelligence operations get wind of storages.

The House is to continue investigating the smuggling, and the Senate will commence its own inquiry.

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