DEA agents and New York City’s finest were shocked last weekend to find yet another segment of society corrupted by the War on Drugs — Teddy Bears. In a raid on a Bronx safehouse, police and federal agents uncovered over 44 lbs of heroin and $150,000 in cash trafficked by the customizable bedtime friends known as Build-A-Bears.
According to one onlooking neighbor at the raid site:
My daughter has one of those toys. I’m very surprised something like that was going on right here and I’m especially surprised it was a Build-A-Bear.
While the news certainly comes as a shock to the community that calls the bears home, one wonders whether we might have seen this coming earlier. After all, these bears are so diverse in the way they choose to live their lives. There are firefighter bears, surgeon bears, even subprime mortgage-lending bears. Is it any wonder that some of these bears turned to the high-risk, high-reward lifestyle of smack trafficking?
In this economy, trying to eek out a living as a high school musical bear or a bear on a military pension just isn’t possible the way that it was in the halcyon days of beardom. A bear has got to make ends meet, just like anyone else.
Some will argue that these bears, as couriers, were just bit players; pawns in a game played by weathered New York City drug traffickers. And every single Build-A-Bear caught up in this mess will have his day in court. But before they go out and summon their fancy lawyer bears and publicity bears, they’ll have to own up to the part they had to play in this operation. Yes, these bears were built for a purpose. They were designed and raised as heroin mule bears. But does your build determine your fate? Does not every bear ultimately choose his or her own destiny?
Perhaps the most famous bear of all, Winnie the Pooh, once said:
People who don’t Think probably don’t have Brains; rather, they have grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake.
Even bears with grey fluff upstairs should have known better on this one. Thanks, Pooh.
