What Does the DEA Really Know About Rabbits and Marijuana?

​When a rabbit gets stoned, does it get the munchies for carrots?

This is the type of of pressing question Beryl Lipton, a member of Muckrock, a site that helps users file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, hopes to have answered. She just filed a FOIA to the US Drug Enforcement Agency asking for "any and all reports, memos, notes, communications, or other materials related to the relationship between rabbits and marijuana, the effects of marijuana on rabbits, and the effects of marijuana legalization on rabbits or other animal populations."

Asking the DEA for info on stoned rabbits might seem like a wild goose chase, but it's apparently something at least one agent is concerned with: DEA agent Matt Fairbanks testified about his experiences with wild, weed-addled hares in front of a Utah Senate standing committee last week, the Washington Post reported.

The standing committee was debating the approval of a bill that would legalize medical marijuana use for people with certain illnesses. Fairbanks said he believes the passage of such a bill would encourage backwoods grow ops that will decimate the environment and apparently get all the rabbits in the area high. Fairbanks has apparently encountered a rabbit zonked on backcountry kush before.

"I deal in facts, I deal in science," said Fairbanks, before detailing his harrowing experience for the standing committee.

"The deforestation has left marijuana grows with even rabbits that had cultivated a taste for the marijuana," said agent Fairbanks. "One of them refused to leave us. We took all of the marijuana around him, but his natural instincts to run were somehow gone."

So far the only documented cases of rabbits getting real faded involve scientists forcing them to ingest THC, marijuana's active ingredient—like in this 1989 study—and its byproducts, like in this 1991 experiment that intravenously administered marijuana-derived materials to monkeys and rabbits to see how it affected their eyes.

Is the DEA just blowing smoke about rabbits and pot? Probably. But who knows? Maybe the agency really has done a lot of work on the effects of illegal grow ops on wildlife. Either way, humans may be able to use legal pot in gummy or liquid form in Utah, since the bill passed the standing committee and will be sent to the Senate for debate.