Drug-eating rats raid police evidence room filled with mushrooms, cocaine and marijuana

Rats with a hankering for illicit drugs are treating a police evidence room like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire last week joined the city's police chief and Harris County district attorney to announce a new effort to clear out old evidence from the city's police department.

And his reasoning raised more than a few eyebrows.

"Just one example, we've got 400,000 pounds of marijuana in storage that the rats are the only ones enjoying," Whitmire said, according to KHOU11.

J. Noe Diaz, the city's police chief, said they have more than 1.2 million pieces of evidence — including "notes from a 1947 homicide that we still keep."

"We have instances where we have kilos of cocaine from the 90s where people have already been sent to prison, have already been released from the sentence, and we still store it," he said.

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Joshua Reiss, general counsel of the district attorney’s office, said rats also accessed a narcotics division evidence room.

"The Harris County District Attorney's Office was notified last week that the HPD Narcotics Evidence Room at 1200 Travis had a problem or issue with rodents," Reiss told KHOU11.

In response, the district attorney's office now has to notify defense attorneys in more than 3,600 open drug-related cases of the breach out of an abundance of caution, though Reiss said the pests only fouled evidence in one active case.

"They got into packaging containing mushrooms," he told the outlet.

Reiss said the problem isn't limited to Houston or Harris County.

"Narcotics evidence rooms and evidence rooms in general that are filled to the brims with old evidence, it's a national issue," Reiss said.

Officials in the county said they plan to destroy evidence seized before 2015 to help curb the infestation.