The Man’s Best Friend

From Reason Magazine:

When the local drug dog shows up to sniff lockers, cars, and backpacks at Temple City High School in Southern California, senior Jonathan Huynh takes immediate notice. His heart rate jumps, his breathing slows, his hands start to sweat.

But Huynh isn’t nervous because he has something to hide. His wariness stems from firsthand knowledge that drug dogs aren’t the infallible sniffing machines imagined by the U.S. Supreme Court and much of the public. When Huynh was an eighth-grader at Oak Avenue Intermediate School in Temple City, a drug dog picked out his gym locker during a random search. When Huynh returned to the locker room at the end of class, a school administrator opened his locker in front of him and the rest of his classmates. The detection dog immediately lunged for the backpack and took hold of it, but when the administrator subsequently searched it, he found no drugs or other contraband. When the administrator and the canine team left, all the other students started laughing at Huynh. “I felt completely humiliated,” he later wrote on an online message board.