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>If anything, in states where delta-9 THC is illegal, a bag of marijuana flower is far more likely to be one of these legal versions

You don't actually believe this, do you? Marijuana is incredibly abundant everywhere I've ever been, legal or not.

I'm Canadian, weed is legal here. I think it's insane people can get locked up for it. I toke on occasion myself. But if you get pulled over by the police and your car smells like dope, I'm a-ok with that being the bar of suspicion for a DUI. If you're the 1 in 1000 smoking pure CBD, I suppose you have nothing to worry about.

In a non-legal state, he’s probably right. There are 13 vape shops with a two mile radius of my house, in a city of under 100k. They’re always busy. One big advantage they have is they can do credit card sales, whereas since marijuana is still federally illegal the credit card companies, banks, etc won’t touch it.

Driving is a actually a bit different since it's a privilege. You can be compelled to give a blood test or other sobriety test or lose your license.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's case law around the smell of non-alcoholic beer on a driver.

But as the upper commenter noted, 'suspicion' is not probable cause.

In a state where marijuana is legal, pulling over a driver and noting a scent of marijuana does not seem like probable cause for that driver to be intoxicated. What if the driver just drove a friend or rideshare to the airport, and they smelled like marijuana? What if the driver just bought the legally permitted limit of marijuana at a dispensary, and the bag is in the car? The smell of pot is pretty notorious for being strong, and for lingering for a long time.

>If you're the 1 in 1000 smoking pure CBD, I suppose you have nothing to worry about.

I don't think anyone who has experienced being suspected of, blood tested for, and then exonerated over a baseless DUI would say they have nothing to worry about. It is a dreadful, stressful, worrisome experience in which everyone except you is hoping you will fail and is in fact furious if you don't.

> Which also means that K-9's should have to be replaced with new K-9's that aren't trained to smell or "indicate" on marijuana because they can't distinguish between legal THC-A weed vs. illegal delta-9 weed. So their "indication" can't be considered a reliable piece of evidence when they still indicate on legal material.

I'd agree with most dogs that have already been trained. However, I'd be curious to see if a dog could be trained to differentiate the two. I wouldn't discount it out of hand, those noses are something else.

Didn't we already learn that K-9 mostly take cues from their handler rather than actually working?

https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/563889510/preventing-police-b...

https://www.animallaw.info/article/cueing-and-probable-cause...

That's like the counting horse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Fair enough. In a more just world, it would be interesting to see if dogs could differentiate the two by smell.

Even if you could train a dog to reliably do that, how do you train people to reliably operate the dog? This is the problem with drug dogs now, they are highly attuned to the desires of their handlers.

It's worse than that.

In principle you could easily avoid K9 detection just by putting the drugs in an airtight container. In practice it's hard to avoid any of the drugs getting on the outside of the container or any person who walks into a room with them, and the dog may be able to smell that.

But the same is true when you don't actually have any drugs. Walking through a room (e.g. a club) where someone else has drugs can cause the scent to get on you. Infamously, the majority of cash has traces of drugs on it. So the dog can't detect a kilo of drugs in an airtight container, but it can detect traces of drugs outside of it, which are commonly on people who don't actually have any drugs. The whole thing is a pretext.

Also absurd is arresting people for consuming marijuana

They just want an excuse to bully people.

I don’t like what you do in private so let me make your life unbearable until you stop.

Don't forget that the evidence shows that how much marijuana smells is directly impacted by skin color[1]

[1] https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/black-drivers-..., https://www.ppic.org/publication/racial-disparities-in-law-e..., https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/dc-marijua..., etc

> The bud will look and smell exactly the same as marijuana flower with high levels of illegal Delta-9 THC.

Leaving aside the broader issues of US drug policy, I'm not sure about that logic: Isn't it like how guns and bags of money and corpses could be totally innocent movie props?

There's always some point where investigation has to happen based on probabilities because nobody starts with perfect knowledge.

It's not reasonable to investigate every baggie of marijuana in a state where the vast majority of marijuana sales are THC-A with minimal delta-9 THC.