"He’s always very meticulous about how he handles drugs."

An ounce of cocaine can fetch as much as $1,300 on the streets of Miami, or a three-year mandatory prison sentence in criminal court.

Or it can help a fourth-grader win first place in the science fair at Coral Gables Preparatory Academy.

In fact, Emma Bartelt’s “Drug Sniffing Dogs” project earned her a spot at Saturday’s Miami-Dade County Public Schools Elementary Science Fair at Miami Dade College, alongside experiments exploring name-brand battery life and how to make plastic out of milk.

Emma, who was awarded an honorable mention Saturday, couldn’t have done it without the help of the Miami-Dade Police Narcotics Bureau, which provided three narcotics detector canines and 28 grams of powder cocaine for her experiment.

Read more at the Miami Herald.