Rats managed to break into an evidence room at a police headquarters building and eat confiscated marijuana, a New Orleans police chief has said.
Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said rat droppings have been found on officers’ desks, and the aging offices of the department are decaying and not up to scratch.
The building is infested with vermin, mold, and cockroaches, Ms Kirkpatrick said of the building, where the department has been since 1968.
She told city council members on Wednesday: “The rats eating our marijuana, they’re all high.”
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She added: “The uncleanliness [in the building] is off the charts.”
Ms Kirkpatrick said officers are subject to terrible working conditions and it’s affecting morale, with staff working with broken air-conditioning and elevators, and potential recruits don’t want to come in for interviews.
But she praised the cleaning staff who “deserve an award for trying to clean what is uncleanable”
She added she’s been trying to find new premises for the 910 officers since being chief in October.
The council is considering a proposal to spend $7.6m to temporarily relocate the police department to a high-rise building in downtown.
Although it’s not common for rats to eat marijuana, it has been reported before. In Northern India, rats were accused of eating hundreds of kilograms of cannabis seized from drug dealers in 2022.
It became an issue when police were asked by the court to provide 368kg of cannabis in a case, but rat infestations impacted more than 700kg of evidence in various police warehouses.
A study by the University of British Columbia found the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis made lab rats lazy. In an experiment with 29 trained rodents, rats had to choose between a simple or difficult task to earn more treats, but they would choose the harder task before being given marijuana, and then pick the easier task after consuming it.
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