A Maryland company is renting out trained drug-sniffing dogs for $200 an hour. The target customer: Parents who want to find their kids' drugs. And a bonus: The dogs can find guns and explosives, too!

Hey, parents! What's the best way to stop your kids from doing drugs? What's that you say? A conversation? Ha! Nice try, hippie. The best way to stop your kids from doing drugs is to search your home with a drug-sniffing dog once a week, rented from Maryland's very own nonprofit organization, Dogs Finding Drugs:

A new service in Maryland is promising parents peace of mind by allowing them to essentially rent a drug-sniffing dog, a highly trained canine that will come to their house and within seconds, detect even the tiniest whiff of narcotics. The program allows ordinary moms and dads access to a search tool typically reserved for law enforcement - and typically aimed at suspected criminals...

Anne Wills, who runs the just-launched, Catonsville-based nonprofit, says parents are clamoring for the service and she expects business to "explode."...

"Bottom line is, parents need to use every resource available to protect their kids from drugs and their home," [former Baltimore "Drug Czar" Michael Gimbel] says. "This is just another new and creative way to attack the problem."

It certainly is new for parents and their children! It is not really that new for, say, DEA agents and drug traffickers. But, in the end, what's the difference between a kid and a drug lord? Or between a parent and a narcotics officer?

Alas, similar businesses haven't succeeded as well as one might hope, possibly because it is a bizarre thing to do, to rent a police dog because you think your son or daughter is smoking weed. (One line of business that seems to do well, though: Renting drug-sniffing dogs out to schools.) So here's a proposal: What if, instead of renting these dogs out to parents, Dogs Finding Drugs rented them out to, say, people who know they bought a dime the other week, and hid it somewhere, and now they can't remember, and their guy isn't picking up the phone, and Jesus, they had such a stressful day at work. How is that not a successful business strategy?

[Baltimore Sun]