It’s not safe on Sesame Street anymore. According to the Web site for Fox News, a Colorado methamphetamine drug ring was caught using toys, such as Hokey Pokey Elmo, to smuggle 99 percent pure meth worth $864,000.
It’s a sad day when a drug lord uses a public television childhood icon as a trafficking tool for drugs. Can you see it: little girls or boys unwrapping a Christmas present, uncovering the coveted Elmo doll and finding inside the voice-box a bag of meth? Little kids may think it’s powered sugar. What do we tell the doctors when children have to be admitted to the hospital because they’ve OD’d on “sugar?” You can’t help but think, “What if?”
Isn’t it bad enough that you have to pay inflated prices for an Elmo doll on eBay because all of the stores are sold out? When Nintendo released their Mario dance pad, they underestimated the public and sold out as soon as they hit the stores. Unable to keep production up with demand, people sold theirs for $200 depending on how close Christmas was. People could spend up to $300 for an Elmo doll, and find it’s only the tool of a drug lord, not the toy they were hoping to receive.
Despite the fact that this recent event occurred in a small town, the concept of toys for drug use has become all too common. Displayed in movies, toys as probable tools for trafficking, we not only give the drug lord a gun, we hide it in a teddy bear.
People are scared. Parents are scared their teenagers are out getting pregnant, raped, using drugs or pulling tricks, and it’s all happening under our noses. But we seem to already know what’s going on. Things like drug trafficking through Elmo have happened before. But what have we done to stop it?
We’ve just stopped talking about it and let it fester inside. My closest relative to a sister is my cousin who is four years younger. I would protect her with my life, but what is it really that I’m protecting her from? Am I trying to protect her from an Elmo doll?
She’s much too old for Elmo, and I doubt that she’s looking for a “sugar-daddy” to allow her to indulge in x-rated fantasies or hallucinogenic drugs, but all the same, I am afraid.
Even now, as you read this, you may have thought about what could happen to your brother or sister, daughter or son if they had gotten that particular Elmo doll.
Elmo is no longer a leader in educational fun with learning. He now represents the bigger picture: A 15-second spot of information with no intent to scare us or warn us, only to inform us. Inform us of our own fear of “What if?”
Crystal Claussen is a junior English and journalism major and a weekly columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
