My expirence was the same in the military with low amounts that we trained on then when we meet with a larger deparment the MWD would reach it saturation point and walk the aide. That has happened in many situations when I have worked with the Military or when I was in the military program. I think that is proof that the odor does change. Now that I am a Deputy K9 I have alot more accsess to the higher amounts of narcs. And even when I train with the military they show the same results. They always want to use my narcs due to little amount of narcs that they have. The bottom line is the more experience the k9 has on differnt amounts of odor the better it will be.

I will not advise anyone to train with 10% coke. When you cut cocaine to 10%, it is true that 10% of the material is still cocaine, but not 10% of the odor. Cocaine is typically cut by using two types of adulterants, one gives it bulk and the other type gives it the pharmacological impression that it has not been cut. By the time that at least 2 kinds of each type of adulterant is used (which is typically the case), and depending on what part of the trafficking chain the drug is when it is seized and deployed as a training aid, the percentage of cocaine vapor within the total headspace signature of the cut material is reduced to less than 5%, and it will take a K9 more time to ascertain that this vapor tendril is significant. And imagine 1 gram of this being used for training...in this case the percentage of cocaine-specific vapor might be less than that needed to surpass the olfactory threshold of the canine in the first case! This this reflects the kudos we have to give our K9's for doing the job that they have done so far, more so in narcotics detection, as we have made their jobs difficult for them to do, due to some of the training aids we provide for training. We have to provide the full scent signature to our canines, it is not there automatically because we have 1, 2, 10, or 100 grams of a material.

I wouldn't advise using cut drug either. Use as pure as you can possibly get. Dogs trained with pure drugs won't have a problem with the diluents. It's nothing more than just another odor to them. In reality though, most of the street drugs you seize have been "cut". It's why we don't use street drugs in our training process. While it's been shown in research and daily on the street, dogs trained on pure (as pure as possible) drugs will find drugs that have been cut far below 10%.

DFrsot