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400,000 Pounds Of Marijuana In Storage And Rats Are The Only Ones Enjoying It

Police departments across the country are dealing with a rather peculiar situation. Rats and other invaders, such as cockroaches and insects are infiltrating into police evidence lockers, eating the evidence, and putting case-solving in jeopardy, disrupting over 3,600 drug cases, as previously reported by KHOU.

Inside the Houston Police Department, there are more than 1.2 million pieces of evidence lying in storage, some of which date back to the 1940s. Some of what is piled up on the shelves is attracting rodents, including around 400,000 pounds of marijuana.

“We’ve got 400,000 pounds of marijuana in storage that the rats are the only ones enjoying,” John Whitmire, Mayor of Houston, said.

“This is a problem for property rooms everywhere in the country: rodents, bugs, fungus—all kinds of things love drugs,” Dr. Peter Stout, CEO of Houston Forensic Science Center, additionally mentioned.

Rats, like many animals, are opportunistic feeders and are drawn to substances that might offer them some form of nutritional benefit, sensory appeal, or curiosity. Some of the reasons why these pests might be attracted to marijuana are: nutritional content, such as proteins, fats, and other nutrients, particularly in its seeds and leaves. Its aromatic attraction, and potential psychoactive effects.

Nonetheless, marijuana is not the only drug stored as evidence being eaten; psilocybin-producing fungi have also been reported as affected. “They got into packaging containing mushrooms,” HCDAO general counsel Joshua Reiss said.

It is evident that this unusual circumstance is getting in the way of police investigation, since any modification in a piece of evidence will have an effect on the overall case. Clearly, the police department is forced to handle this matter quickly and effectively.

The public safety department proposed to carry out a procedure that consists of the destruction of unnecessary evidence. In Houston, Texas, officials have announced plans to destroy narcotic evidence that is no longer required for active cases, much of which appears to be insignificant now. This includes substances stored for decades, aiming to reduce the backlog and prevent further rodent consumption. 


The evidence disposal will apply to all accumulated evidence dating as far back as 2014.

But still, those measures are extreme and legal experts believe that burning all the evidence is not a prudent solution but rather an incautious one.

“Although crowded evidence lockers are a problem police departments nationwide struggle with, legal experts warn that the urge to throw out old evidence should be tempered, because one never knows what could be useful for future investigations and as forensic technology advances. But allowing seized narcotics to pile up can also threaten the troves of more valuable evidence by attracting pests,” Peter Stout, who leads the Houston Forensic Science Center reported to The Washington Post.

The Houston Police Department has already hired exterminators but the situation remains unresolved; the rat infestation is extensive and exceeds every attempt to address it.

In the dialectic between the different positions on how to resolve the issue, the Houston county has been pressured and will be hiring a prosecutor whose tasks will consist in supervising the evidence destruction.

The process of destroying the evidence has begun; the first burn occurred on Thursday. This initial phase concluded in what appeared to be an unprudent solution. “Burning old drugs could incur costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, because it must be done in accordance with environmental guidelines, ” said Houston’s police chief, J. Noe Diaz. The district attorney’s office.


Still, the individuals in charge are eager to put an end to the problem and are willing to direct the district attorney’s funds to this matter.


“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.

On the other hand, the challenges and difficulties of burning hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence is not the only circumstance of expert opinions against this reckless behavior, the criminal case solving being in jeopardy is decisive in this matter.


The application of new technology to old cases has been exceptional to solve them. According to The Washington Post: In 2018, authorities compared crime scene DNA, stored for decades, against genealogy sites to track down the ‘Golden State Killer,’ who was responsible for a string of rapes and murders dating back to the 1970s. In 2020, a rape kit that was tested after being preserved for years exonerated a man who was wrongfully imprisoned for more than two decades. 


“I just can’t emphasize how important I think that is, considering the unfortunate incidences of wrongful convictions,” Andrew Jurs, a law professor who teaches courses on evidence and criminal procedure at the University of the Pacific, said after expressing the crucial importance to maintain DNA or any biological material, even if the defendant has already carried out their sentence.

The possibility of others resolutions exists, for instance, spend some of the assigned funds to get more evidence storage rooms, as Richard D. Friedman, an expert on evidence and a law professor at the University of Michigan, advised. However, that would appear to be an action that postpones the necessary task and delays the real issue.

RA Staff
RA Staff
Written by RA News staff.

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