You can tell something is on Jack’s mind. The 18-month-old Labrador retriever seems particularly interested in the bottom right dresser drawer. After a few more passes, he nudges the drawer and adamantly sits down, looking with great interest at the man holding his leash. No sooner, Jack gets the reward: a dirty, slobbery tennis ball. Inside the drawer sits a plastic bag with marijuana residue inside of it.

“He’s an amazing dog,” said James Cocco, one of Jack’s handlers and an employee at Solid Landings Behavioral Health in Costa Mesa, Calif. “His ability to find hidden drugs is pretty remarkable. If there are drugs hidden in a room, he will find them. But we aren’t doing this to punitive. This is only to add an additional layer of protection for our clients that truly want to be sober.”

 Solid Landings’ newly created Canine-Assisted Client Safety Program (CACSP), which is one of the first of its kind in the country, was conceived to simply help clients struggling with their addictions.

 “Jack is an advocate, to some people, the appearance of a drug-detecting dog may be seen as intimidating or something to fear,” said Tim Arrigo, Jack’s primary handler. “This is not the case with Jack. First and foremost, he is a friend to everyone around him. Jack’s intention is not to instill fear but, rather, to hopefully prevent the possession and use of narcotics through his presence. His ability to detect contraband is unparalleled. Solid Landings achieves success through the safety and security of its residents. With Jack’s aid, we increase client care by maintaining a healthy and drug-free environment.”

 According to the owners of Solid Landings, which is one of the largest privately owned substance-abuse facilities in the United States and was recently named the fastest-growing company in Orange County for 2015, the decision to add the program wasn’t a hard decision to make.

 “It’s no secret that the reason we have grown so much in the last two years is because of our commitment to premium client care,” said Steve Fennelly, CEO and one of the company’s co-founders. “The entire premise of the program revolves around providing the safest environment possible for our clients. We take our clients’ safety very seriously, so adding an additional layer of security made perfect sense.”

 Jack comes from one of the top bloodlines in all of Europe and falls into a category of dogs that comprises less than 1 percent of all canines — which means he has the intelligence and motivation to be a DEA-certified detection dog, according to his trainer, Any Falco, of Falco K-9 Academy in Yorba Linda. Falco trained Jack for countless hours before he was given over to Solid Landings.

 “It’s funny, when you take him to the dog park, he is just a typical goofy, Lab looking to please humans,” said Cocco. “But when you put that vest on him and take him on a search, he turns into this hyper-focused superdog.”

Detection dogs like Jack utilize their acute sense of smell to penetrate many hiding places that are inaccessible to other detection methods. A dog has about 200 million sensitive cells in its nose, compared to about 5 million or so in a human being, and therefore, a dog's olfactory system is around 40 times more sensitive than that of a human.

 A dog's sense of smell is made even keener by an organ in the roof of the mouth that is not found in the human olfactory system and this enables it to "taste" a smell, amplifying a weak smell into a stronger one. Dogs' sense of smell overpowers our own by orders of magnitude — it's 10,000 to 100,000 times as acute, scientists say. "If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well."

 “Their training has led them to associate a toy with the smell of drugs; they're actually looking for is their favorite toy. They have an impressive sense of smell, but also strong hunting instincts. In the drug detection world, that translates into an extremely high drive to seek out whatever they have been trained to find,” according to Anne Wills, owner of Dogs Finding Drugs.