In this HLN Crime Biters segment, host Speaker A interviews AJ Vargas, CEO of Custom K9 Unlimited, about the impact of marijuana legalization on drug‑sniffing K9 units. Vargas explains that detection dogs are trained to alert to four odors—marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine—and that once an odor is imprinted it cannot be removed without retraining. A live demonstration shows Striker, a trained detection dog, locating a concealed marijuana‑scented item, illustrating the alert behavior (sitting and staring at the source). Vargas discusses how law‑enforcement agencies handle dogs when marijuana becomes legal: they may repurpose the dog to a jurisdiction where marijuana remains illegal, retire the dog if it is of retirement age, or simply stop training the marijuana odor in new dogs. He notes that case law ties a dog’s alert to probable cause for searches; when the odor becomes legal, that probable cause disappears, rendering the alert unusable for warrants. The segment concludes with praise for the dog’s performance and a brief recap of the operational challenges posed by changing drug laws.
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10 states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana, and that's put some police departments in a tough spot with their drug-sniffing dogs. What do you do with a dog whose skill is no longer needed? For some drug-sniffing dogs across the country, that is really the question. Is it early retirement? To talk about this, I want to bring in AJ Vargas. He's the CEO of Custom K9 Unlimited here in Georgia, which helps train dogs for law enforcement, and he's brought along Striker. First of all, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having us.
I really appreciate it. Now, can you explain to me the skill that Striker has that really now could be a liability?
Yeah, absolutely. He's a drug detection dog, so he's essentially trained to detect 4 types of odors: marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. He is going to an area where marijuana right now is still legal.
Okay.
So that's the reason why those Those particular odor sets are still trained on this particular dog.
Okay, so in theory, you would have to retrain him to not sniff out marijuana if he wants to work in states where it's legal, correct?
Yes, if marijuana was illegal, then we would then not even train him to detect that odor. Because once we imprint this dog on a particular odor, that is the odor sets. We wouldn't retrain him or change that later on.
Okay, well we've set up a demonstration. We've had one of our trainers hide something that smells like marijuana and I wanna see if Striker can find it so that way our viewers can comprehend what he does.
That's right.
All right, let's watch.
Here we go. Come on, Striker. Here.
And can you just narrate for me as we're watching him?
Yeah, so this is his handler. He's been trained with this dog specifically. He'll give him a command and the dog will target specific areas to sniff. So the dog will sniff each article as they move along, and once he moves through, once he finds the odor that he's been trained to, he'll then sit and stay at that odor.
Okay, he's working right now. Striker's handler is Colton Steadman.
That's right.
And, and this is— there's, there's There's thousands of dogs who do this across the country.
That's right.
And so what I'm curious is, is if a department doesn't need his services, if the laws are changing, what will happen? That's a good boy. Okay, so you can explain, before you answer that, can you explain what would happen?
Yeah, so what happens is, is the trained odor that, one of the trained odors that he's trained on, once he locates that odor, he's then going to display a behavior change and come to a sit and stare at the location of where that odor is coming from.
So clearly he obviously did an excellent job. It's not easy to do this at all. This takes a lot of training. And so what happens to these pups?
Well, you know, in most cases with a dog where the state laws have changed, then they'll either repurpose that dog to another state that still accepts the odors that they're trained on, or they'll retire the dog if they're at a retirement age. Anytime a dog is trained on these odors, case law allows us to establish probable cause with their alert, which allows them to either write a search warrant or to conduct a search of that item. And once that odor has then became legal, it negates that, that probable cause, so we can no longer use that.
So you probably will have to change— in theory, you may have to change how you train these dogs across the country.
Yeah, I mean, essentially what we would do is just not train that odor. Right. We would leave that odor out of the odor set that we train them on.
Does that put you in a predicament? Does that make it harder for you?
No, actually it'd make it easier because then now we're only training 3 odors instead of 4 for a drug dog. So we would just leave that odor out and not train it.
All right, AJ, thank you for joining us, and thank you to Colton, thank you to Stryker. That was unbelievable. They're really, they're, they're really such impressive animals.
They are.
He's, he's, he may be a little clumsy right now with the Kong, but, but he did an excellent job, for the record.
