Drug-eating rats invade police evidence room and get taste for coke and cannabis

Houston we have a problem – rats have been dining out on everything from marijuana to psychedelic mushrooms in the city’s police evidence room.

John Whitmire, the mayor of Houston, put it simply during a press conference: ‘We’ve got 400,000lb of marijuana in storage that the rats are the only ones enjoying.’

Joshua Reiss, general counsel of the Harris county district attorney’s office, told KHOU: ‘The Harris county district attorney’s office was notified last week that the HPD Narcotics Evidence Room at 1200 Travis had a problem or issue with rodents.

‘They got into packaging containing mushrooms.’

It first became a problem in October and not even professional exterminators could entice the drug-addicted rats away from the drugs.

To illustrate the problem further, Houston police Chief J. Noe Diaz pointed to one piece of cocaine evidence from 1996 that was still in the lockup. 

The person tied to the drugs pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and has been released.

Houston keeps 1.2 million pieces of evidence in a downtown evidence room and at a second warehouse.

This evidence includes hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of confiscated drugs over the years.

It has prompted top city officials to rethink the way in which drug evidence is stored.

Diaz said keeping decades-old drugs was ‘not something that we can continue to do as a professional police agency.’

Law enforcement officials and the mayor have decided to destroy narcotics evidence that was found before 2015 and that is no longer needed for a case.

Previous rules meant that evidence was only destroyed if it came to the police before 2005.

Let’s hope these new rules keep the rats at bay.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.