A team of Australian drug sniffer dogs has been sent back for retraining, after it was found they could only track talcum powder, not cocaine.
Melbourne police found that the white powder used to hone the dogs' nostrils was not in fact an illegal substance.
A probe is now under way to see whether any illicit drugs have gone missing.
"They're very good at detecting talcum powder," joked Assistant Commissioner Paul Evans. "If there's any missing kids, we'll find them fairly quickly."
The seven dogs had been in training since January.
They are meant to sit down next to a person, when they detect the scent of cocaine.
Unfortunately, the dogs have yet to smell the drug, since the bag of white powder supplied by the Australian Federal Police for the canine training turned out to be talcum powder.
Police in Victoria have launched an inquiry to see whether any cocaine has gone missing.
MD11Engineer From Germany, joined Oct 2003, 13336 posts, RR: 64 Reply 1, posted (8 years 2 days 5 hours ago) and read 1543 times:
Mostly they get trained to smell traces of vinegar (acetic acid, used in manufacturing Heroin) and acetone (used for manufacturing Cocaine). Most illegal drug manufacturers don�t bother to purify their drugs to laboratory purity, so the drug still contains smellable (for a dog) traces of these chemicals.
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