SCARBOROUGH (NEWS CENTER Maine) — The legalization of marijuana across the country is threatening the jobs of some police dogs. K-9's who are trained to detect pot are now becoming a liability. In Maine, most new K-9's are no longer being trained to sniff out pot.
Back in 2013, when recreational marijuana became legal in the city of Portland, law enforcement agencies in Maine saw the writing on the wall: If they were going to make the huge investment of buying and training a drug-sniffing dog and have it be effective, they needed to think twice about how that dog was trained.
Dogs trained on marijuana are complicating searches where pot has been legalized. When police dogs sniff out drugs, they can't tell you what drug they've just detected.
Scarborough Police Sgt. Tom Chard has been a K-9 handler for 24 years. Right now, he is training his fourth police dog.
"If the dog is sitting, which is the alert we use," Sgt. Chard said, "then we know the dog is alerting on an odor, a narcotic odor, but we can't tell you which odor that is."
That poses a problem for prosecutors.
"A defense attorney can kind of tear your case apart because of that aspect," Chard said.
Police departments in Maine saw this trend coming and for the past several years and many have chosen not to train it's new K-9's on marijuana.
Chard said Maine's heroin epidemic also came into play.
"The harder drugs, they wanted to refocus our searches on that, not marijuana," he said.
Police departments with drug-sniffing dogs, who are trained on marijuana, can still utilize them in drug work, but it would be limited to situations where there is already probable cause or in places where pot is still off limits, like jails and schools.