compared to the cost of so many lost cases... and of cases never pursued. “What you’re really going to miss out on,” he explains, “is that guy who’s committing other crimes and just carelessly smoking marijuana in the car. Those cases are now gone.” Hundreds of thousands of cases, he believes. “Now, you’re never going to get in that car.” Legalization isn’t just a blow to these dogs’ sense of purpose, in other words. Although it’s that, too. “Where it becomes a little more complicated as a handler,” says Mesloh, who trained and handled three drug-sniffing German Shepherds of his own before an injury landed him among the professoriate, “is when you leave, and the dog sits there alone while you and the other new dog go to work. That would be,” he pauses, searching for the right word, “uncomfortable.” Mesloh, who brought his retired dog with him to the classroom in the first few years after they left the force together, hadn’t heard Tulo’s story. Nor does he know how Tulo will feel when, in the coming months, Corporal Duncan starts going to work full- time without him. He just knows, as every trainer does, that in the awkward early years of cannabis legalization there will be more – too many – excellent dogs tipping over trash cans and wondering why they’re not wanted at work anymore.
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Alice Lloyd is a writer in Washington, D.C. and a Weekly Standard widow.
American Consequences 29
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