Cops in India Blame Rats for the Disappearance of Hundreds of Pounds of Weed
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Cops are blaming rats for destroying over 1,000 pounds of weed that has mysteriously gone missing from police warehouses in northern India.
This bizarre tale came to light during a recent drug trafficking trial in the city of Mathura, Uttar Pradesh. To provide evidence in the case, the court asked the local police department to present 195 kilograms (430 pounds) of weed they allegedly seized from drug dealers. Cops showed up empty-handed, however, without a single piece of evidence to support their charges. As an excuse, the police prosecutor claimed that rats had eaten all the weed they had stored in their warehouse.
"There is no place in the police station where the stored goods can be saved from the rats,” the prosecutor told the court, according to the Hindustan Times. "Being small in size, the rats have no fear of the police, nor can the police officers be considered experts in solving the problem.”
This is apparently not the first time that weed-loving rats have been blamed for destroying police evidence. In a recent report submitted to a special Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act court, the Mathura police claimed that rats had destroyed more than 1,280 pounds of weed that was being stored at the Shergarh and Highway police station.
The court was highly suspicious of this dodgy explanation and ordered the cops to provide proof that rats actually destroyed the contraband weed. And if the explanation really holds merit, the court ordered the cops to deal with the rat infestation and implement procedures to store police evidence properly.
“There’s a rat menace in almost all police stations,” the court document said, according to CNN. “Hence, necessary arrangements need to be made to safeguard the cannabis that’s been confiscated.”
Cannabis does indeed have psychoactive effects on rodents, and many researchers conduct cannabis-related research using lab rats. Most researchers agree that rats would never intentionally eat hundreds of pounds of weed, though. So after this implausible story hit the press, a local police officer came up with a completely different story to explain what happened to the missing bud.
Mathura City Police Superintendent Martand Prakash Singh told CNN that the contraband bud had actually been “destroyed by rains and flooding,” and was not eaten by rats after all. “There was no reference to rats” in the court documents, Singh said. “The police only mentioned that the seized cannabis was destroyed in the rains and flooding.”
A similar story played out in 2018 when Argentinian cops claimed that rats had eaten half a ton of weed that was supposedly being stored in a police warehouse. Local authorities concluded that there was no way rats could actually consume that quantity of bud, though, and 8 cops were eventually fired for stealing the evidence.