Nobody wants to come anymore, it's ruining the atmosphere. If this is how clubbers are going to react, it hardly makes business sense. If I saw a club with sniffer dogs, I'd think it had a problem, that it was a moody club. But Racquets's Wayne Hipkiss, along with many other club owners, doesn't know where to turn. People may scoff.
Racquets is only a minor mainstream club, a veritable pin-prick on the vast clubland map of Britain.
But with Michael Howard's legacy of zero-tolerance still biting hard there are going to be many companies like Narco Dogs making money out of club country's increased paranoia. Their common selling point is that at least if you've got a sniffer dog on your door, the police can't say you weren't doing everything in your power to keep drug dealers at bay. An argument not to be sniffed at if it were only that simple. Just as there is no national licensing for bouncers, there is no legislation governing sniffer dogs. In other words, that sniffer dog slobbering at your crotch may just be Mr Owner's pet Rottweiler.