Police in Texas have hatched a plan to stop the rodents getting their fix. For rats in Texas, 4/20 has come early. Houston-area rodents have forced police in the area to change the way they operate after developing an addiction to drugs stored in station lockers.
![[Houston Mayor John Whitmire said that the rats were the only ones enjoying the drugs.]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/05/17/21/Climate_Houston_Storm_91324.jpg)
The mayor and law enforcement officials have now decided to dispose of the evidence sooner to stop the rodents from getting their fix. To illustrate the problem, Houston police Chief J. Noe Diaz pointed to one piece of cocaine evidence from 1996 that was still in the lockup. The individual tied to the drugs pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and has since been released, he said.
He added that keeping the decades-old drugs was “not something that we can continue to do as a professional police agency.”. City officials said that 1.2 million pieces of evidence were being kept in a downtown evidence room and at a second warehouse. That evidence includes hundreds of thousands of pounds of confiscated drugs.
The city will destroy any drug evidence collected before 2015 that is no longer needed to adjudicate a case. Under the previous protocol, evidence could only be destroyed if it came into the department's care prior to 2005. Peter Stout, the president of the Houston Forensic Science Center, said during a press conference that infestations targeting long-dormant drug stashes are not a Houston-specific issue.
