DJ Smith works with Xanax the dog in a search for drugs at a Santa Monica sober living home on Nov. 18, 2011. (John McCoy/Daily News Staff Photographer)
As DJ Smith watched Xanax, a drug-sniffing dog, search for narcotics around a sober living home, he couldn't help but think how a dog like the eager Belgian Malinois might have changed his own life.
Smith, 23, had become addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol at age 16. His family suspected, but they never knew the extent of his problem. Nor did they find the pills he'd hidden in innocuous over-the-counter medicine bottles or disguised in other ways.
So the Agoura Hills family constantly worried if and when Smith would come home at night, or if he would survive his latest hospitalization.
"Unfortunately, I didn't have a service like this," said Smith of Narc with a Bark, a North Hollywood-based business that uses Xanax
the drug detection dog to find drugs in private homes and rehab facilities, and doesn't involve law enforcement.
"A service like this would have intervened a lot quicker," Smith added.
Now nine months sober and training to become Xanax's handler, Smith likes the fact that the service is geared not toward catching people with drugs in order to report them to police, but to offer solid proof of use to those interested in helping them recover.
"It's not to get anyone in trouble," said Smith, who is now working on a counseling degree. "It's not like a bust, it's not to get you expelled from school. It's strictly for gaining more information for a family that is worried and doesn't know what's going on..."
