Nearly 200 kg of cannabis that had been seized from criminals and stored in police stations in India was reportedly destroyed by rats, according to officials.
A court was informed that rodents occasionally ate the marijuana that was being preserved as evidence.
The judge cited three instances where rodents destroyed marijuana.
According to a statement read in court:
“Rats are small animals, and they have no fear of the police end it’s challenging to protect the drug against them.”
When the court asked the police to present the narcotics they had confiscated as evidence, they claimed that 195kg of cannabis had been “destroyed” by rats, according to Judge Sanjay Chaudhary’s order.
In another case, the police reported that “part” of the 386kg of cannabis was “eaten up by the rats.”
Around 700 kg of marijuana that the police had seized was languishing in police stations in the Mathura area, according to Judge Chaudhary, and “all of it was in danger of rat infestation.”
He claimed that because the rats were “too small,” the police lacked the knowledge to handle the situation. He said that selling the medications at auction to research facilities and pharmaceutical companies, with the money going to the government, was the only way to safeguard the stolen products from “such fearless mice.”
Eight Argentinian police officers were discharged in 2018 after they suggested mice were to blame for the theft of 500 kilograms of marijuana from a police warehouse.
Experts, however, refuted the assertion, stating that it was unlikely that the animals would mistake the medication for food and that “if a large group of mice had eaten it, a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse.”