Not to pull out the Jack Booted Thug aura, but....
A police dog detected the odor of drugs. None were found,
Dare I say, typical? Yes, it worked out OK this time around, but was there really an odor of drugs on the vehicle? (In this case, probably. But....)
My brother used to drive a real beater of a car, purchased second hand: a Dodge Neon which had been in an accident (replaced pannel parts), had rusted over in many places (AZ sun), and had half a dozen 'hippy' decals and college stickers on it (eh, my brother is a bit of a fruit). My brother doesn't "do drugs". He'll drink alcohol occasionally, but that's about it.
He's taken this car back and forth between SD and AZ two or three times now (ie both ways), and he has been stopped by police on three of the trips so far - once due to an out tail light, and twice due to an officer being at one of the rest stations with a dog, looking for drugs.
I'm guessing he was passing through a drug traffic corridor, because each time the dog 'smelled drugs' and the officer hastled my brother and his girlfriend (one of the times) for close to an hour, taking appart his car and luggage (he was moving/traveling for vacation), and generally treating him as if he were already guilty. No drugs whatsoever were found (thank God - it
was a second-hand car, afterall), but the dog did take a liking in a bag of cookies.
And, I've heard that police can make their dogs 'detect' drugs pretty much at whim. It seems like a fairly convenient system for police, where a dog is trained by reward to detect drug odors, giving them the incentive to detect them. I realize there are dog log books and what have you to help mitigate this kind of thing, but an omission from a log book wouldn't allow for the detection of such anomolies.