Wow! Just wat I've Always wanted: A Drug and Explosive Detector!

So do the beagles at our local airport - they also reproduce themselves and are cheaper. Mind you the waste is a little off-putting....

Ken

There is always a downside to any level of technology. ©

in

and

It's always nicer to pat the computer. I mean the beagle. :-)

Ken

Beagles are ok, but this is my favorite one to pat:

If you scratch her gently on the top of her head and she'll roll over to have her belly scratched, too.

and

Certainly could be if they ate any of the picograms they found.

"Careful walking round the garden dear, the dog's just been out, mind you don't get your foot blown off"

We recently had an article on a weekly TV newsmagazine that revealed that the dogs are not as accurate at detecting stuff as people think. I believe they mentioned that their error rate was as high as 30%.

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Saw the same item in 'Fortune', though they said something like 'up to 40%'. However this was in relation to broad-spectrum (for want of a better expression) detection, rather than instantaneous detection of a single substance or group of substances. The really bad results were from detecting a culprit in a line-up (nose-up?) from a sample of something they touched some time ago.

Ken

Ken, scent tracking by dogs is an entirely different application than their use in the detection of certain illegal drugs. While I suspect that the vapor pressure of well packaged designer drugs, cocaine, etc. are well below the detection capabilities of both dogs and machines, dogs perform extremly well for the detection of high vapor pressure materials like poorly sealed packages of cannabis. (I won't suggest what "well packaged" means, to avoid giving ideas to the bad guys...but any chemist or physicist understands.)

Inadequate training is the limiting factor on the accuracy of drug sniffing dogs. By this I mean that a well trained hunting dog can detect and go into a specific "point" when it detects a game bird...It doesn't do this if it happens to encounter a piece of meat or other tasty food...By contrast, a drug sniffing dog gives no specific indication that it has drugs, and often displays an identical interest reaction when it sniffs cannabis or some sausages being brought home in a suitcase! If the suitcase is constructed of leather, it may even display interest in the suitcase itself.

Given this lack of adequate training, the dogs will in fact produce a high number of false alarms because they exhibit identical behavior patterns with both food and drugs. Perhaps this is a characteristic useful to the FDA, but not to the DEA! :-)

So, why not simply teach the drug dogs to go to "Point" when they stiff drugs, but not when they sniff food? Seems like a 'no brainer' to me. The question to me is why, with the billions available to them, why isn't the 'War on Drugs' already researching this?

One possible soulution would be to commission several well known "Pointer" trainers to teach drug sniffing dogs and see what the outcome is.

Harry C.

p.s. The same problem is experienced with cadaver sniffing dogs, with the same rather obvious solution for the problem.

detecting

touched

Not disagreeing with anything you've written. In New Zealand and Australia there are different dogs for food and drug detection. The Fortune article also mentioned poor training and human induced errors as a reason for the high rate of false detections.

Cheers.

Ken