Can they search my car if they smell marijuana?

This is the question where the answer depends on which part of Florida you're in, and most of what's published right now doesn't apply here.

Appellate courts covering the Tampa and Orlando regions have held that cannabis odor alone no longer establishes probable cause, reasoning that legal hemp and medical marijuana are indistinguishable by smell from illegal marijuana. That's real, it's significant, and it's what nearly every Florida article on this topic is describing.

Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River, and Okeechobee counties fall under the Fourth District Court of Appeal, which has not adopted that position. As recently as 2024, the Fourth District reversed a suppression order and upheld a vehicle search where the officer both smelled and observed marijuana.

So the honest answer for someone stopped here is that the plain smell doctrine has not been rejected in this district, and a search based on odor is more likely to be upheld locally than the statewide coverage suggests.

The Florida Supreme Court has been asked to resolve the split.