Britain Goes After Pot Growers With 'Scratch And Sniff' Cards
For many years, across the world, the extraordinarily powerful noses of dogs have been successfully used to help detect crime.
Now, in Britain, moves are underway to recruit humans to perform the same subtle work.
Police are encouraging the British to step out of their homes, raise their nostrils aloft, and see if these catch the whiff of wrongdoing wafting from the next-door neighbors.
Visitors to these crowded islands are often charmed by the small red-brick terraced houses that feature in every town and city.
But law enforcement agencies here say the attics and back rooms of some of these homes conceal illegal urban micro-farms in which criminal gangs are cultivating marijuana for commercial sale.
They want the British public to sniff these out.
Scratch And Sniff Cards
To perform this task, humans - like dogs - first need a little training. So a crime-fighting charity, called Crimestoppers, and police are this week sending out more than 200,000 "scratch and sniff" cards to households around the country.
They want to educate the national nose.
The British generally need little assistance detecting the presence of a smouldering joint. Millions of them use, or have used, marijuana. They know very well what it smells like, once alight.
These scratch cards are intended to teach them how to recognize living cannabis plants. Scratch, sniff ...and there it is: the strong sweet smell of cannabis while it's actually growing.
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