It's about 1:30am, a cold Saturday night on Chapel Street in Melbourne's CBD, and about 20 police have turned up with a sniffer dog.

They're blocking off queues of people waiting to head into the clubs, then weaving the drug detection up and down the line. Some people are nonchalant, others less so. It's tense, awkward, and swift.

This is Operation Safenight, the police response to what happened on a January weekend, when three people died and 20 were hospitalised after taking what they thought was MDMA.

For the last three weekends, since April 29-30, sniffer dogs have been used on people waiting in line outside the clubs. Victorian Police say the highly visible operation is designed to scare people from drug use.

But researchers say there's no evidence the dogs will deter people and prevent another mass overdose, and they could even encourage that outcome.

A new campaign, High Alert, is being launched this week to warn people about where police are out with sniffer dogs at any given time. It's similar to the NSW Sniff Off initiative.

High Alert's founder Nevena Spirovska told Hack the police's approach is ineffective at best, and dangerous at worst.

"This is a huge invasion of our civil liberties, our right to privacy, and our right to go out," she said.

High Alert is also going to provide people caught up in the operation with legal information about their rights when it comes to searches and sniffer dogs.

"We are going to test this in court if we need to. We've got two barristers and a legal centre that have signed on to take a case, should it come to it," Nevena explains.

Share Facebook

Twitter

Mail

Whatsapp A line outside a club in Melbourne CBD.

By day this is a buzzing shopping strip, and tonight young people are spilling out of fast food and pizza joints and laughing and yelling at each other as they walk past.

"I've never seen so many cops, it's kind of intimidating," says one young guy outside the glaring all-night convenience store. "Especially at this age, cops just target young people."

A girl says: "It feels like an attack."

Another guy says: "It's probably the first time I've seen this, I've been coming for two years. I don't think it's going to achieve anything. It's going to ruin the time for users that do it for fun, and not going to find the dealers or find the problem."

But are the dogs effective?

This kind of sight is more common in Sydney than Melbourne, where sniffer dogs are used more about pubs and and clubs and train stations. New South Wales has the country's largest police dog detection unit - last year we learned it cost $9 million per year.

RMIT University law lecturer, Dr Peta Malins, believes Operation Safenight could signal a change in sniffer dog tactics in Victoria's capital.

"There's a chance it might start happening more around Melbourne," she says.

The use of sniffer dogs is controversial. A comprehensive 2006 review by the NSW Ombudsman (the public sector watchdog) found the dogs were often inaccurate. In the study, police found three-quarters of searches result in no drugs being found.

Aside from concluding the dogs were not any good at sniffing out drugs, the study also found little evidence to support claims the dogs deter people from using drugs.

It also questioned whether the program was cost-effective.

Police are using dogs more than ever. Since 2006 the use of sniffer dogs has increased in NSW and been taken up by other states and territories.

Share Facebook

Twitter

Mail

Whatsapp Operation Safenight.

On Chapel Street on Saturday night, a young guy from Stockholm, Sweden, watches in astonishment as a dog is trotted up and down the club line.

"I've never experienced anything like it," he says.

"I don't appreciate it, to be honest. The amount of people they pulled out of the queue is not reasonable. Either that or Australians do heaps of drugs."

Could dogs cause panic overdoses?

Dr Peta Malins from RMIT has been researching dogs for the past 18 months. She says that, apart from the question of accuracy, there's concern people will see the dogs, panic, and then take all their drugs at once.

"There' a huge overdose risk, or of people stashing it in various ways, or pre-loading and taking it all before they go out to venues."

Victorian Police say there's no evidence dogs cause an overdose risk.

Martha Tsamis, licensee of the Chasers Nightclub, watches the operation take place and says she suspects it's a publicity stunt.

"If they wanted to protect people they would have come out the week later [after the January overdoses], but they didn't," she tells Hack.

On the first weekend of Operation Safenight, 20 people were arrested. Of these, 16 were referred to drug diversion programs - meaning they weren't trafficking drugs. The result suggests police are mostly arresting small-time users, Martha says.

Sixteen kids with weed in their pockets, that's not a success story," she says.

This Saturday night, even fewer are caught: 10 people are arrested, and nine of these will be referred to drug diversion programs.

Superintendent Philip Green says this is a good result; the dogs are scaring people from taking drugs into the area.

He also dismisses claims the dogs are not accurate and that they can encourage harmful behaviour such as panicked overdoses. He says Victorian Police are told "85 to 90 per cent" of the time the people picked out by the dogs are either in possession of drugs, or admit to having recently carried or used them.

He argues dogs are justified by the aim of saving lives.

"Then we can stop people playing by choice a form of Russian roulette, putting a pill in their mouth without any idea what it may contain."

The MDMA overdose in January turned out to be NBOMe, but police decided to not release this information to the public. It was later leaked.

Asked whether police should have released the information, so people knew what they were potentially taking, Superintendent Green argued that educating about NBOMe would not have prevented potential future overdoses from other drugs.

"Information is shared as and when we can or do have that opportunity presented," he said.

"Yes it contained compound A, B or C, but that doesn't change or affect the provenance of a substance that may be around week after or the week after that."

The only true solution, he suggests, is don't do drugs.