Rats Get High by Eating Marijuana Evidence Stored at New Orleans Police Headquarters
New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick reviewed the dreadful conditions within the building.
I recently had a chance to visit New Orleans. And while the city was fun, I missed seeing its latest attraction — rats who are buzzed after eating marijuana evidence at the city’s police headquarters.
Rats have infiltrated the New Orleans Police Department’s deteriorating headquarters, breaking into the evidence room and getting “high” on marijuana, a police official said this week.
“The rats are eating our marijuana. They’re all high,” Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department Anne Kirkpatrick told council members Monday at a Criminal Justice Committee meeting, according to WWL Louisiana.
Joining the rats, the building is also home to a cockroach infestation, mold, no air conditioning, and elevators and bathrooms that don’t function properly, the superintendent added.
Kirkpatrick’s comments come just weeks after New Orleans, considered one of America’s top tourist and party cities, welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors for Mardi Gras.
New Orleans police have occupied these headquarters since 1968. The infestations are pretty severe, as there are reports of officers finding rat droppings on their desks.
City officials are taking steps to move the department to a new space. That’s been a priority of the police chief since she took office in October.
The chief said her 910 officers come to work to find air-conditioning and elevators broken. She told council members the conditions are demoralizing to staff and a turnoff to potential recruits coming for interviews.
“The uncleanliness is off the charts,” Kirkpatrick said, adding that it’s no fault of the department’s janitorial staff. “They deserve an award for trying to clean what is uncleanable.”
While the situation may seem humorous, there are significant public health consequences for rat infestations that are not resolved. For example, we recently reported on a fatal case of bubonic plague in New Mexico (rodents and their fleas are carriers of the disease-causing bacteria).
Back in 2019, we reported that the Los Angeles police department had officers falling ill with typhoid linked to the explosion in the rat population within the region (and associated with homeless camps).
The I-Team has been exposing uncollected filth, an exploding rat population and fears of a new typhus outbreak in downtown Los Angeles, with an LAPD officer working downtown possibly the latest victim of the disease.
A spokesman for the LAPD confirmed to the I-Team that an officer stationed at Central Division has typhus-like symptoms but has not yet been diagnosed with the disease. Typhus can be spread by infected fleas that live on rats that have been linked to growing homeless encampments.
The disease can cause fever, chills, vomiting and confusion.
It appears New Orleans Police Chief Kirkpatrick, a West Coast transplant, may have paid attention to the 2019 reports. When she transferred, she was adamant about getting a new headquarters.
One NOPD veteran, speaking anonymously, said the headquarters building has been infested with vermin for his nearly two decades on the force, and that it’s not unusual for officers to develop a sneeze or cough after a visit to the moldy building.
“It’s horrible. I don’t think it ever recovered from Katrina, to be honest,” he said. “The basement was full (of flood water). You get a lot of rodents that climb through the walls. Some things you just can’t get to, so there has always been some type of rodent, bugs, rats, mice, whatever.”
Kirkpatrick suggested her outsider perspective helped her see the age-old problem and “extreme disrepair” with fresh eyes.
Here’s hoping New Orleans addresses the rat infestation before my next visit. I also hope that city and state leaders around the country begin to appreciate the serious public health threats posed by ever-increasing rat populations within our urban centers.
I missed seeing the marijuana rats during my recent tour of New Orleans. pic.twitter.com/8sdB9M8iY1
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) March 14, 2024
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Comments
“Mickey?
Mickey ain’t here, man!”
Unsurprising. With my City nickle and diming you for every little thing, they tend to be spendthrifts for everything else and not maintaining the buildings adequately. Even Civil District Court has an issue with the elevator, in my 26 years of working in the legal field, there have been times that 2 of the 3 elevators did not work or had other issues.
Now, they work better today, but there are signs that say no more than 4 people and DO NOT HOLD THE DOORS. Reason being is that they may not even close.
But seriously…
Rats are a big thing in the country. I just bought three more bait stations. In my hangar, I don’t even bother with stations, I just string the bait blocks on wire between nails. The packrats gobble ’em up like green M&Ms. Six months ago, I noticed that rat activity was lower. While I was noticing this, a bobcat leapt out from where he had been living under the workbench and hightailed it out the door. Good times.
Give new meaning to rolling a “Fat Rat”
‘Rats ate the drugs that we can’t account for’.
Sure.
Sure.
They also took the guns, money, and jewelry. Damn rats.
“The dog ate my homework” …
You don’t get high from just eating marijuana. You can just eat hash and get wasted, but not weed. You have to heat marijuana up, either cooking it or smoking it.
I would think the cops would know stuff like this …
Hey Sarge. The marijuana in the storage room is missing. You want me to make a report?
No, there might have to be an investigation. Just say “The rats ate it.”
Well, it’s not like the rats are eating it to get high, they’re eating it because it’s edible nutrition.
I used to sautee bud in butter to make “Budder” for popcorn which we would enjoy on movie night in the student union lounge.
Wrong. People get high all the time from eating marijuana. It depends on how much THC is in the marijuana.
That’s the trouble with rats. They just want to get high and run for public office.
🪳There’s roaches in the evidence room! Not roaches, roaches! 🐀
Sounds like the typical residents of New Orleans if they just throw in some booze.
It seems that the real reason for the recent spate of glue trap bans is to prevent rats from sniffing them.
While I won’t make light of the infestations, the problems in the building are evidence of other issues – mainly the lack of maintenance and a lack of a capital improvement plan to keep the buildings at peak operating performance.
Anyone who owns property knows that buildings are in essence, living things. They need to be “fed” in the terms of maintenance and “exercised” in the terms of replacing systems that go down.
But governments don’t think that way. They would rather let buildings deteriorate because they would rather spend the money elsewhere and then make the claim a spiffy shiny new building with shiny toys in it needs to be built.
The politicians and officials will further waste time and money on having gatherings and pictures taken during “ground breaking ceremonies.” When the building is done, there will be one of the most offensive demonstration of hubris in the plaque mounted on the wall with the names of the Mayor, the Council members and other officials in remembrance of them “building” the new structure. Not a dime will be spent on the mention that it was the citizens who actually paid for the building because officials didn’t do what they needed to do to keep the other building going.
A few years ago a town near me wanted a new police building but the old building was fine. So the town let it decay. The roof was not replaced when it was needed. The HVAC system was not replaced or maintained.
Officials then said “we need to replace the building!”
Governments don’t care about maintaining buildings because it is not their building. They don’t maintain the building as they do their own homes. They don’t care about it because they get to spend other peoples’ money and look good while doing it.
50 years ago, you couldn’t work in the Pentagon without seeing a rat at least weekly. You’d walk out the River Entrance (the Secretary of Defense’s entrance) in summer and watch the rat families cavorting in the shrubbery.
In our TS computer room, the raised floor was rat heaven. One day, our field engineer had floor tiles up, pulling on cables to trace their routes, and felt a sharp pain in his hand that wasn’t stopping. He pulled his arm up out if the floor to find a feral cat hanging onto it! There was apparently a whole damn ecosystem developing under the floor. He had to bash the cat’s head against the mainframe to kill it before he could pry it loose. Now, rats can squeeze through some pretty small gaps, but it was concerning that somewhere there was access to a TS area big enough for a cat to get through. Of course, no one made an effort to find and secure it.
Meanwhile, the FE vowed that he’d be tracing all his cables by serial number from that day forward.