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How to (Possibly) Sneak Drugs Past a Detection Dog

Look, it’s probably not gonna work, but if you’re still gonna give it a go anyway, you might as well try one of these options

You need to slip drugs past a detection dog, huh? I won’t ask why — that’s your business. But I’m happy to help.

Unfortunately, it won’t be easy. In fact, it might even be impossible. A dog’s sense of smell is believed to be 10,000 to 100,000 times better than that of a human, which means a well-trained detection dog will likely smell through your attempts at concealing drugs. “It’s very hard to fool a detection dog,” Jessica Schulte, a canine nose work instructor, tells me. “They ‘interpret’ odors on the chemical level, so even if the drug is hidden in something stinky, the dog would still be able to detect that specific chemical.”

Detection dogs still make mistakes — some analyses of their signals have shown error rates exceeding 50 percent — but most of those blunders are false alerts. That means if a pooch does mess up, it’s likely that they’re signaling for drugs that aren’t there, not skipping over drugs that are.

That hasn’t stopped people from trying their luck at sneaking all sorts of goodies past sniffer dogs, though, and some claim to have had success. Here are a few of those methods, pulled from around the internet.

Smell-Proof Bags

One of the challenges when attempting to mask the scent of drugs from detection dogs is that most materials are porous. That means you could tuck your drugs into 10 layers of Ziploc bags, and the odor would still creep its way out. (Though, because cold temperatures decelerate the permeation rate, freezing your drugs before packing them away may buy you some time.)

Smell-proof bags (or containers), which are typically lined with activated carbon, sort of solve this problem if they’re the real deal (at least according to Berry Law, a criminal defense firm in Nebraska). The problem is, it’s near impossible to avoid contamination: Even if you put your drugs in a smell-proof container, there’s a good chance that you’ll get microscopic but odorous particles somewhere, and a detection dog will pick up on those.

So yeah, you could try a smell-proof bag, but there’s no guarantee it’ll work.

Deer Piss

Deer pee, which is used by hunters to mask their scent and attract large bucks, is full of pheromones (and can be easily acquired on none other than Amazon). Allegedly, those pheromones have the potential to distract a detection dog from doing its job. It’s the same reason why another nearby animal — say, a family pet — may also catch a sniffer dog’s attention. But it could also completely backfire and make you even more of a target, in which case you’ll be busted and smell like ungulate piss. That’s no good.

Your Holes

You already know this one: Hide the drugs in one of your holes. Just put your drugs in a condom, tie it up and gently push it into one of your openings (with lube, of course). Once you’re where you need to be, push it out and enjoy. Again, it’s possible that a detection dog will still catch the scent on you, but unless you’re acting weird or have already committed some other crime, it’s unlikely that the cops will go so far as to check inside your body, especially if you’re trying to get into a big event and they’re trying to move people along. Hey, people do it for a reason.

Honestly, that’s about it. It’s possible that you could sneak through whenever the detection dogs change shifts. Or if you’re really crafty, you could hide your drugs in a hole at the area where you’re going — say, a music festival — then dig them up once you’re past the dogs.

Otherwise, there’s just no guarantee that the pooch won’t catch you. Sorry, bud.