DEA
Agent Predicts Dope-Crazed Rabbits If Utah Passes Marijuana Bill
By Samuel Warde
The State of Utah is considering a bill legalizing
the use of edible forms of marijuana certain debilitating medical conditions.
However, a DEA agent testified before a hearing of a Utah State
Senate committee last week that if the state passed the bill the state’s
wildlife may “cultivate a taste”for marijuana and lose their fear of
humans.
The Washington Post reports that Matt Fairbanks,
Special Agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, spoke of his time with
the DEA spent eliminating back-country marijuana grow operations in the Utah
mountains:
Personally, I have seen entire mountainsides subjected to pesticides, harmful chemicals, deforestation and erosion. The ramifications to the flora, the animal life, the contaminated water, are still unknown.
Fairbanks added that at some of
these grow operations he witnessed that:
The deforestation has left marijuana growths with even rabbits that have cultivated a taste for the marijuana. […] One of them refused to leave us, and we took all the marijuana around him, but his natural instincts to run were somehow gone.
The Guardian reported that Jeremy Roberts,
president of the company Medical Cannabis Payment Solutions testified in
response to Fairbanks’ statements:
I was kind of shocked to find out the killer rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is actually in the Utah mountains.
Roberts humorously added:
Evidently we hear that it makes rabbits go crazy if it’s grown in Utah, in the mountains, so one of the things we want to do is make sure we don’t have any crazed rabbits any more in Utah, and actually bring that into control into the Department of Professional Licensing.
And for any of you cynics out there,
Fairbanks noted that “I deal in facts. I deal in science.”
However, as The Washington
Post reported, Fairbanks “is member of the ‘marijuana
eradication’ team in Utah,” and you might recall that “some of
his colleagues in Georgia recently achieved notoriety by raiding a retiree’s
garden and seizing a number of okra plants.”
In spite of Fairbanks’ testimony, US News reported that last Thursday, “the
Senate committee voted 3-2 to approve the bill and send it to the full Senate
after a nearly two-hour debate about the legal and moral dangers of allowing a
medical marijuana program in the heavily Mormon state.”
Samuel Warde is a writer, social and political
activist, and all-around troublemaker.
