NYPD Spends Thousands of Tax Dollars on Psychedelic Drugs and McGruff the Crime Dog Costumes

The New York City Police Department has been engaging in some Technicolor tactics to measure the the power of the psychedelic substances being sold on the city’s black market. A new report suggests that that the Big Apple’s bad boys in blue have spent thousands of dollars of taxpayer money on hallucinogenic substances, like magic mushrooms and ecstasy, in order to conduct a chemical analysis of the drugs to measure their strength against the dope being slung on the street corners of the five boroughs.

According to DNAInfo, the NYPD tracked down a couple of chemical companies (Sigma-Aldrich Inc. & Sigma) and purchased over $13,000 worth of psilocybin and MDMA. While it may seem odd, NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis claimed this is a common practice for many police agencies, and that drug deals of this magnitude are conducted all of the time.

“When examining a suspected illegal substance, it is necessary to have a verified comparison sample to validate the analysis,” Davis told DNAinfo New York.

Spending tax dollars on shrooms and other trip drugs is not the most bizarre purchase made over the past few years by the NYPD. The report goes on to show that the department spent an additional $13,584 in May of 2013 on eight McGruff the Crime Dog costumes, which were acquired from the National Crime Prevention Council, a non-for-profit organization that has been persuading kids to become snitches for several decades.

Interestingly, High Times found that the NCPC still uses the McGruff figure as their fearless mascot, even after John R. Morales, the actor who played the dope-sniffing hound for 16 years on their televised public service announcements, was found guilty of running a sophisticated marijuana grow operation, while maintaining possession of several military-grade weapons, including grenade launchers.