We’ve presented a few articles about drug fueled animals before. That’s not a sentence that you really think about typing, but here we are. There have been cocaine cats, sharks, and hippos. A lot of animals will eat just about anything, whether it’s good for them or not. One of the more persistent little critters guilty of that is the rat. Sure, they can be cute and helpful in lab experiments, but they also can get into almost any nook or cranny imaginable. This can be a problem when it comes to food pantries or you know, evidence warehouses where drugs are stored.
In the Texas city of Houston, the rats are eating the drugs. As the mayor of the city stated, “We got 400,000 pounds of marijuana in storage. The rats are the only ones enjoying it.” The resilient rodents can be a pest under normal circumstances but imagine they’re also addicted to drugs and they know where they’re stored. That seems to be the problem Houston authorities are having. It’s an impact that actually has ramifications for the justice system as well.
Drugs are often stored as evidence for relevant cases; something that makes sense for both the prosecution and the defense. That being said, sometimes a case can be completely open, shut, and resolved with a served verdict and the evidence can still be around. But especially in a defense case it’s better to be safe with evidence than sorry. The last thing any defense attorney wants to hear in reviewing an old case is that the prosecution’s evidence no longer exists to be reviewed.
The rat problem is affecting how this evidence is destroyed. Previously, the only way you could dispose of things is if the drugs were entered into police custody prior to 2005. Under new regulations, as long as the case can no longer be adjudicated and the evidence was collected before 2015, it can be destroyed. Naturally, the argument could be made that maybe they just need to work harder at destroying the rats, but apparently drug fueled rats are even harder to exterminate than non-doping ones.
We reached out to the rats for comment but they were too stoned to give a response. That and they don’t actually speak a human language.
