SALT LAKE CITY — Testifying in opposition to a bill that would allow medical marijuana edibles in the state of Utah, an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration warned last week that local rabbits could become addicted to pot and lose their natural instincts if the law passes.

“I deal in facts. I deal in science,” special agent Matt Fairbanks told a state Senate panel, according to the Washington Post. “Personally, I have seen entire mountainsides subjected to pesticides, harmful chemicals, deforestation and erosion.”

Fairbanks went on to say that at some illegal marijuana grow sites, he saw “rabbits that had 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 ramifications to the flora, the animal life, the contaminated water, are still unknown,” he concluded.

While it’s true that illegal pot farming can have harmful environmental consequences, so can the illegal farming of any other crop, including corn or wheat, the Post reported.

As for the bunnies:

“Some wild animals apparently do develop a taste for bud (and, yes, best to keep it away from your pets),” reporter Christopher Ingraham writes. “But I don’t know that the occasional high rabbit constitutes grounds for keeping marijuana prohibition in place, any more than drunk squirrels are an argument for outlawing alcohol. And let’s not even get started on the nationwide epidemic of catnip abuse.”

Read more at The Washington Post