Smelling or seeing evidence of weed is very much a common reason that traffic stops turn into vehicle searches.

I'm not at all anti police, but I've seen some laughable claims by officers that were extremely confident in their abilities to smell weed when they shouldn't be.

I remember watching On Patrol Live and one police captain claimed that he smelled weed from the car in front of him while they were driving 40 mph.

He wasn't a total asshole, but he was 100% overconfident in his abilities and would frequently cite smelling weed as probable cause to search vehicles.

His fellow officers even seemed to mock him in small ways, jokingly saying he had the nose of a bloodhound in a sarcastic way.

That kind of bullshit goes away if you make weed legal.

That's interesting.

Drug sniffing dogs are a pretty controversial topic in and of themselves anyway. (Or they should be, their reliability is dependent on the human trainer and the humans are pretty bad at it.)

Sure...but the evidence for that is different than simple possession.

Granted, it could be an interesting time figuring out what no longer applies, but as an example....I've seen cops search a car because they saw shake in the back seat....that would seem like insufficient evidence to search a car if possession isn't a crime.

In theory, you'd have to smell weed on the driver, not just in the car in general. Now...maybe a car smelling like pot can be searched and maybe it can't, the courts will have to decide that eventually.

But the point is that possession being legal changes things from "any sign of weed is probably cause" to "only signs of impaired driving gives probable cause".

You're picking a fight with the wrong person.

The entire context of my commentary is how problematic laws making possession illegal are, because of situations like what I described.

It doesn't matter whether he knew he was making it up or if he was just an idiot that believed his own bullshit, they're bad laws either way.

I'm not giving him a pass for what he did, I'm simply following the old adage "never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence".

At the end of the day, the why doesn't matter, the laws are problematic regardless.

So stop trying to fight with me over malice vs incompetence because we're on the same side of the issue. I don't have to think ACAB or something in order to agree with you.

I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt here, I think he really does believe that he smelled weed.

Therefore, he's incompetent, not malicious....in my head.

I'm not trying to give him a pass, but that's why I say NTA.

It changes more than you think.

It won't be illegal for your passenger to be high or carrying it or for it to be somewhere in the car. (You might have some version of an open container law, but unless they put that on the books, the existence of it in the car is not probable cause.)

So if the existence of weed alone isn't illegal, that means that the smell of it and sign of it (e.g. shake or paraphenalia) of it in the car are not probable cause for a search.

Think about it...they can't search your car on the basis of seeing a (at least closed) liquor bottle, they need actual evidence of something more.