The NYPD Spends Thousands of Dollars on Magic Mushrooms, Steak Dinners
The NYPD may have a bigger molly budget than your average NYU co-ed. DNAinfo looked through the NYPD spending records from the past several years and found, among other things, the city’s police force spent “thousands of dollars” on ecstasy and hallucinogenic mushrooms. A department spokesperson explained the drugs, which are generally reserved for festival-goers and people who describe themselves as “creatives” living in Bushwick, were necessary as “comparison samples” to measure against drugs seized as evidence.
Records obtained by DNAinfo show the drugs weren’t scooped up from some common drug dealer (as if), the NYPD kept it classy and hit up a St. Louis-based chemical company and one Brooklyn-based medical supply company to score. Though the department declined to release numbers for exactly how much they blew on molly, we trust it was a lot based on the more then $13,000 the NYPD spent on ‘shrooms.
If the police department payed something close to street value for the psilocybin, they might have acquired just over 34 ounces of the stuff. Like, we’re not saying we know how the process works exactly, but it’s a little bit crazy to think you’d need that many mushrooms just for comparison. Also we can’t say for sure it’s a coincidence there are approximately 34,000 officers on the force.
The spending records also reveal the department occasionally blows serious cash on steak dinners. In May of 2014, the NYPD wrote a check for $3,400 to Gallagher’s, a restaurant in Midtown Yelpers call a “classy,” “meat locker,” and “traditional boys’ club steakhouse” that is “OMG Yum” with “extremely nice” bathroom attendants. According to the department, the steak dinners are part of a city-wide rewards program for civil servants.