It's becoming a familiar sight in the street leading to music festivals or at railway stations serving dance festivals. Travellers are greeted by the sight of a large number of police moving through the crowd with leashed dogs - and when a dog shows interest in someone they are required to empty their pockets and be patted down with a body search. Handbags or backpacks are emptied and thoroughly searched - and sometimes a victim is led away in handcuffs.
Welcome to the drug world - and it's main enemy, the "sniffer drug dog ". Dogs have a sense of smell far superior to any human nose and they are trained to detect the full range of illicit drugs. All the mail and small parcels coming into Australia through the postal system face this test and it has a proven record of exposing concealment in many devious forms. Along with the X-ray machines, drug sniffing dogs are our first line of defence in the drugs battle.
The Greens are proposing to introduce a law amendment to require the police to obtain an individual warrant before conducting a search based on the findings of a sniffer dog. They claim that being searched in public is humiliating and that somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of such searches reveal no wrongdoing. In particular, this is an impost on patrons visiting clubs and pubs in the city, and travellers entering Australia at airports.
The police produce a different set of statistics. Last year they conducted 14,000 individual searches in New South Wales and 3,800 of them resulted in the person searched being charged with a drug offence. At one such event attracting young people a drug courier was arrested with 205 ecstacy pills and another carrying 190. Had these come from a "bad batch " the outcome at that dance festival would have been catastrophic !
Those police figures are certainly interesting. The success rate shows that of the 14,000 searches conducted, 10,200 were on people who were not carrying drugs - and that is rather disturbing. In many cases the drug the dog detected was probably Marijuana and that person may have been in proximity to a person smoking "Pot " and had their clothing infected with the smell - or may be a casual user whose past use alerted the dog.
The drug scene has certainly changed, but detection is still directed at training sniffer dogs to look for the whole drug spectrum. When a person is caught with a small amount of Marijuana the most likely outcome is now a caution - and there is a good chance that legal medical Marijuana will soon be a reality. We might be wise to train the next generation of drug sniffer dogs to ignore Marijuana and concentrate on the opiates and drugs like Ice that are doing the main health damage.
Marijuana is widely used in the community and it is verging on the fringe of legality. We still go after both the growers and the importers, but ordinary users are no longer high in the sights of drug enforcement. The fact that sniffer dogs continue to look for Pot is probably the main reason for the high failure rate in drug searches - and stopping and searching 10,200 innocent people really is an embarrassment !
This Greens proposal to require a warrant to conduct any sort of street drug search would entirely close down the screening for drugs at public events - and would be welcomed by the illicit drug industry. One of the problems is the emotional aspect that applies to drugs. Any attempt to rationalise the drug laws brings howls of "soft on drugs " criticism and the police are stuck with enforcing out of date laws. The failure rate in detecting drugs with sniffer dogs is a prime example of why we need both a law revision and a new approach to drug policing.
The reverse of that " If it aint broke - don't fix it ""applies. It is broke - and it needs fixing !
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