Drugs Have Won The War On Drugs: Drugged-Up Rat Infestation Edition

Perhaps the only headline just as repeatable as No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" is this other banger from The Onion: Drugs Win Drug War.

50+ years of hardline prohibition have only resulted in better prices, better purity, and a slew of states legalizing or decriminalizing personal use amounts of any number of drugs, with marijuana leading the way in terms of overall legalization.

Treating drugs users as just as terrible as drug dealers has led to a ton of incarceration and a literal ton of collected evidence that is apparently being consumed by things cops and crooks are used to dealing with: rats.

But rather than this being an infestation of confidential informants or good cops wanting to see bad cops punished, this is exactly how it reads: rats are breaking into the Houston (TX) PD's drug stash and getting high on a supply that, in some cases, may be old enough to vote.

Drug-addicted rats" are eating narcotics seized and stored by Houston police, prompting a change in how long the police department is required to store the evidence, officials said.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare and Houston Police Chief J. Noe Diaz announced new steps Friday to dispose of drugs and other evidence kept at police headquarters downtown, some of which has been sitting there for decades, attracting rodents, even though cases they are linked to have long been adjudicated.

This is where it becomes clear that drugs have won the Drug War. This single evidence locker contains enough weed to start a drug empire.

We got 400,000 pounds of marijuana in storage," Whitmire said. The rats are the only ones enjoying it."

The Houston PD (which has more than its share of corrupt drug cops) is sitting on 200 tons of marijuana it has amassed over the years. And yet, I would wager that no Houston resident has any trouble obtaining this product on short notice.

The same goes for the rest of the stuff in the warehouse, which apparently (until recently) contained cocaine seized in 1996. As police chief J. Noe Diaz pointed out, the evidence has outlasted the case. The suspect pled guilty, served his time, and was free to go long before the evidence used to convict him was.

It's apparently a nationwide problem, according to some of the forensic experts interviewed by NBC News, which carried a story early last year about a similar drug-eating rat problem in New Orleans.

New rules are being put in place to destroy this evidence more frequently. On one hand, it makes sense to destroy evidence after defendants serve their time in jail. On the other hand, I wouldn't get too carried away giving PDs permission to destroy evidence, since that's the sort of thing that lends itself to cover-ups and the disappearance of evidence prisoners might use to challenge their convictions - a process that can take years, thanks to the justice system's reluctance to reconsider its own calls and the byzantine processes convicted people are expected to navigate just to have (a very looooong) shot at having their cases heard.

But above all that, there's the sheer amount of drugs being held in evidence warehouses. If there's nearly a half-million pounds of weed just laying around at any given time, it would seem law enforcement isn't scoring many meaningful wins in the Drug War. At best, it's a game of Whack-a-mole that won't generate enough tickets to make it worth visiting the merchandise booth at the arcade. At worst, it's just cops looking busy, a meaningless waste of time that unfortunately results in people losing years of their lives to a system that not only can't fix what's broken, but clearly prefers doing the things that don't work as often as possible in perpetuity.