Bermuda should put teeth into its anti-drugs policy by putting dog teams on all cruise ships, said Shadow Home Affairs Minister Patricia Gordon-Pamplin.

She spoke out after Government revealed not every cruise ship was being rummaged by the sniffer units, despite the ships being the number one route for summer importation.

Countless tourists have been fined for small amounts of cannabis after raids this season and drug mule Junior Packs was jailed for two years for bringing in $22,000 of cannabis on Horizon. However Permanent Secretary of Home Affairs Robert Horton said: "There would be an insufficient number of team handlers and dogs to cover all port ships when all are in port.

"Consequently decisions are made as to where to deploy the dogs."

He said every ship was hit but not during every visit to port.

Home Affairs Minister Terry Lister said he was not happy about the situation and was trying to get and answer from Police about why coverage was not total. He told The Royal Gazette: "I believe the summer cruise ships are the route by which drugs come in. If that's the case we should be checking all, not on a rotating basis. I was quite surprised."

Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin said more should be done. She said: "We have to be very serious about drug interdiction period, not waffle around. You might as well not do it at all if you are not going to do it 100 percent.

"We need to have them on every single cruise ship."

She said cherry picking which ships got rummaged was useless. Although it had led to minor busts, the policy could mean big couriers still got through said Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin.

"We need more resources, we have to put in the finances. Dogs have a depreciation, a shelf live. Get more dogs if that's what it takes.

"It's certainly a lot cheaper than the cost of devastation to humanity."

She called for ion scan machines to monitor tourists at their point of entry, even if it led to queues on the docks as they disembarked. "It seems pretty simple to me, if you have everyone coming through the cruise ship terminal, clearly you must have effective technology to detect if they are bringing drugs off the ship."