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In early May 2018, Illinois-area newspaper The Pantagraph posed an interesting question in a headline: In broad strokes, the article discussed the potential financial hardship that could be wrought against police departments in that state should it approve the legalization of cannabis — a question that may be on the ballot in November. Those claims rely primarily on the testimony of Macon County Sheriff Howard Buffett, who told the paper: Howard Buffett is the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, has been active in the Illinois law enforcement and philanthropy communities for years, and is an opponent of marijuana legalization. Buffett was selected by retiring Macon County Sheriff Thomas Schneider to serve the remainder of his term after that sheriff retired in part due to health concerns, and he was sworn into office on 15 September 2017. The most controversial comments in the article came from Chad Larner, the director of of the K-9 Training Academy in Macon County (a beneficiary of Buffett's), who said that retraining the animals would be abusive, and thus many retired drug dogs would have to be euthanized if marijuana legalization were passed: We spoke with representatives of two major police forces in jurisdictions that have experienced the legalization of marijuana — the Denver Police Department and the Seattle Police Department — and both vigorously disputed the argument presented by Buffett and Lerner. On the claim that these animals are trained not to be social and therefore unable to be cared for after their service, a spokesperson for the Denver PD told us via e-mail that their dogs are not trained against being social: The notion that these dogs would have to be euthanized because they would not be social enough to find a home in retirement was equally confounding to the Seattle PD, in part because the dogs (in both Seattle and Denver and elsewhere) live full time with their handlers, and continue to do so after their retirement. Seattle PD spokesman Sean Whitcomb spoke to us by phone, telling us, That's nonsense. The dogs that we would retire would stay with the handler. The idea that the dogs would require active retraining, or would need to be relieved of service if the law changed, is also disputed by both departments. The Denver PD told us they still retain dogs that had been trained prior to legalization: Whitcomb, who described the arguments presented by the Macon County Sheriff as absurd, told us — similarly — that the Seattle PD does not retrain their dogs either, and that they remain part of their force: One factual complication, to which Buffett alluded, is that a dog previously trained to sniff marijuana (along with other major drugs) may complicate legal efforts to prosecute people individuals caught carrying legal weed in addition to illegal drugs. The argument is that (legal) marijuana may be what a dog is indicating to the police, who would then use that information to justify a search leading to arrest of an individual for possession of another drug. This argument is especially relevant to California, which recently legalized recreational marijuana through Proposition 64: However, the claim that legalization would force drug dogs to be euthanized is a bad-faith argument rooted in logical fallacies that confound police forces experienced in legalized marijuana. As such, we rank it false.
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