Thanks for the explanation. Don't get me wrong, I think the War on Terror is even worse than the War on Drugs. I'll try to be clearer next time. "Bombs" is int

Thanks for the explanation. Don't get me wrong, I think the War on Terror is even worse than the War on Drugs. I'll try to be clearer next time. "Bombs" is intended to mean "something that we can all agree is really bad". I intended to say "the costs seem acceptable if they stop something really bad" (exaggerating for effect, "nobody who's not already in favour of legalisation is going to buy this argument"). Remember that many think that drugs are really bad. (Some of the data you requested, although I don't think it helps much: http://people.howstuffworks.com/police-dog2.htm http://people.howstuffworks.com/police-dog2.htm suggests that a police dog costs $8500 to acquire. Housing a dog in a shelter costs ~$3000 over the dog's lifetime, IIRC; so $15000 seems a reasonable guess at a dog's lifetime cost. I didn't find the number of active dogs or the cost of officer training, which would be required to calculate cost/successful search. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs: "In 2008, 1.5 million Americans were arrested for drug offenses. 500,000 were imprisoned." Even if we assume that this corresponds to 1.5 million successful searches after a dog alerted, you'd get 6 million searches per year, or about one search every fifty years per American. Of course, that assumes those searches will be randomly distributed; but still, if I felt that drugs were really bad and could be stopped by repression, I'd consider that a reasonable price to pay.)