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We’ve seen cocaine bears. We’ve heard of cocaine sharks. But drug-addicted rats? That’s what is apparently happening down in Houston as rodents are partying their brains off with evidence being held in police department storage lockers.
“We got 400,000 pounds of marijuana in storage that the rats are the only ones enjoying,” Houston Mayor John Whitmire said at a recent news conference.
Peter Stout, who leads the Houston Forensic Science Center, said about the drug-addicted rat problem, “They’re edible, they’re tasty, they’re all kinds of things. You can’t store large quantities of drugs without expecting some of these things to happen. But this is difficult getting these rodents out of there… They’re drug-addicted rats. They’re tough to deal with.”
Houston police have hired exterminators to root out the rats, but like Mr. Stout said, it’s not that simple. There is 1.2 million pieces of evidence currently being stored by the city. So far, they say, only one active case has been affected by the rat problem.
“So much evidence is kept and stored that is no longer needed, that has no impact on the resolution of that charge, that conviction or even that innocence,” Whitmire added.
The Washington Post reports that the Houston district attorney’s office said it had completed its first burn of 15,000 pounds of narcotics last Thursday.
It is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to destroy that much old evidence and do it according to environmental guidelines.
“It costs a lot of money to destroy illicit narcotics, and so the DA’s office is going to utilize funds that we control to help the city with this immediate problem,” Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said.
There is also the question of how long to hold on to old evidence. The last thing they want is to have burned evidence that they might need in the future.
In March 2024, the New Orleans Police Department reported a similar problem with drug evidence being infiltrated by rats and cockroaches.
“The rats eating our marijuana, they’re all high,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said at at the time.
So yeah, we have cocaine bears, cocaine sharks, and drug-addicted rats. Oh, and don’t forget the meth gators.