As an Alexandria drug lawyer can tell you, there are numerous law enforcement officers specially hired and employed to attack drug offenses in Alexandria. In Alexandria here is a vice/narcotics division whose only job is to investigate drug offenses and make arrests when they uncover people committing those offenses. Alexandria also works with federal agencies to help combat drug offenses.
Recently with marijuana being decriminalized in some western states, there has been an uptick in cases where people are importing and shipping larger amounts of marijuana from those states. Police are aware of that trend and conduct operations to arrest individuals involved in those offenses.
Additionally, Alexandria officers also work hard to investigate prescription fraud. They work with the pharmacies and doctors to help crack down on fraudulent prescriptions. They also have a large focus on designer drugs or party drugs like Molly. Because Molly can lead to tragic deaths of teenagers and other young people, the police are concerned with that drug and put a lot of resources into investigating and prosecuting both users and dealers.
There are numerous ways that law enforcement enforces drug laws, and it really varies from case to case. There are patrol officers who come across drugs in the course of their regular patrol, either by responding to calls, searching vehicles that they have pulled over for traffic violations, or searching people on the street.
There are also detectives assigned to the narcotics division that are entirely focused on investigating drug possession and drug sellers. These tend to be longer-term investigations and can involve the use of confidential informants, undercover police officers, and jump out squads to make an arrest.
Those detectives and officers typically have numerous years of experience as police officers and are specifically trained in the investigation of drug use and drug sales. They do undercover operations or they use informants to help build their cases. So, they have a very specific goal, which is to deter drug use and to make arrests for people possessing drugs. And they use many resources and many different methods to enforce these laws.
The biggest mistake that Alexandria law enforcement can commonly in a drug case make is if they do not properly lay the foundation for a search. They either search the individual, their house, or search their vehicle. The term that is used by the courts is “pretextual,” which means the officer thinks an individual has something illegal on them and the officer is going to come up with some sort of reason to search the individual and justify it later. That is probably the biggest mistake that they make -searching when they do not have the legal right to do so. These mistakes could have an effect later on in someone’s defense in order to mitigate their penalties for their drug offense in Alexandria.
It is unusual for drug charges in Alexandria to be dropped. The only reason they would be dropped right away is if the officer made a mistake in the search and did something inappropriate and did not have permission to search and therefore did not satisfy probable cause. The other way is if there was a false positive on a field test and when it came back from the lab, it says it was not an illegal substance.