DEA: If Utah legalizes pot, rabbits (and other wildlife) will get stoned. This is bad why?

Photo: Internet; photographer unknown.


Photo: Internet; photographer unknown.

Utah may soon permit people with certain health conditions to use edible marijuana, which as a cancer patient I believe is a terrific idea.

But there are dangers to innocents, warns the federal government. If the bill under consideration in Utah passes, the DEA says wildlife in the state could "cultivate a taste" for demon weed, lose their fear of humans, indulge in marijuana-fueled orgies, and scamper around high as fuck all the time. An agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration basically said this, without the sex part we added for embellishment, while delivering testimony at a Utah Senate panel last week. Skip to 58:00 for the good stuff.

pot

From the Washington Post:

"I deal in facts. I deal in science," said special agent Matt Fairbanks, who's been working in the state for a decade. He is member of the "marijuana eradication" team in Utah. Some of his colleagues in Georgia recently achieved notoriety by raiding a retiree's garden and seizing a number of okra plants.

Fairbanks spoke of his time eliminating back-country marijuana grows in the Utah mountains, specifically the environmental costs associated with large-scale weed cultivation on public land: "Personally, I have seen entire mountainsides subjected to pesticides, harmful chemicals, deforestation and erosion," he said. "The ramifications to the flora, the animal life, the contaminated water, are still unknown."

Fairbanks said that at some illegal marijuana grow sites he saw "rabbits that had cultivated a taste for the marijuana. …" He continued: "One of them refused to leave us, and we took all the marijuana around him, but his natural instincts to run were somehow gone."

"DEA warns of stoned rabbits if Utah passes medical marijuana" [washingtonpost.com, HT: @jerryknaus]

As regular readers of this blog know, animals do enjoy eating psychoactive plants, and we don't know why but it's adorable so let's just let them be as high as they want to be.

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