Anthrax is no laughing matter!

Published on 11/05/2001 Daily Egyptian (SIUC)

My 17-year-old niece is bored. That's bad. A bored teenager is a dangerous thing. Almost worse than a cornered animal.

She has things she could be doing - we own enough video tapes to start our own video rental store - but her boredom centers around the fact we declined an opportunity to have the-flavor-of-month boyfriend over for the afternoon. So she's helping us regret our rash decision. I suppose it could be worse.

A bored teenager in Palm Coast, Fla. sprinkled a powdered headache remedy on his teacher's desk, hoping it would be mistaken for anthrax and cancel classes. It was and it did. It also garnered him a three-day suspension that could turn into an expulsion, along with a felony arrest. He could find himself stuck with a $10,000 fine and up to 15 years in prison for "planting a hoax of a destructive device."

Two young boys in Sacramento decided to play a prank on their mom by filling an envelope with white powder and leaving it in the house for their mother to find. She did, and apparently added it to the outgoing mail. Lacking postage or a delivery address, it ended up on a desk in a mail facility in Citrus Heights, Calif, where it leaked some of the powder.

Unfortunately for the boys, it DID have the correct return address, and police showed up at their door to see if the family was the target of an anthrax hoax.

Where do kids get these ideas? What makes them think this is a joke?

Apparently, we do.

Adults in this country are mailing fake anthrax to each other quite a bit these days. A New Jersey man was arrested after mailing an envelope of Parmesan cheese to a friend. A television news editor in Seattle crushed up some Lifesavers and left them in an envelope in the newsroom as a joke. A Connecticut man stood by and watched as the state building where he worked was evacuated over an anthrax scare even though he knew it was a hoax. He ended up in federal court and faces five years in prison and $3 million in fines for his little joke.

These jokes are costly, and hardly as funny as they might seem. The $3 million fine the Connecticut prankster faces is based on the $1.5 million it cost the state when the building was evacuated and shutdown.
Anthrax fear is a very real thing in this country. People are scared to death.

A doughnut shop in Florida has quit selling powdered-sugar covered doughnuts because people are afraid to eat them. Northwest Airlines no longer stocks powdered coffee creamer and sweeteners on their flights due to the anthrax fears associated with white powder. A woman in Douglas County, Kansas called the local sheriff thinking anthrax was dropped on her car from an airplane when she white splotches on the hood. It turned out to be bird poop.

It isn't funny. Ok, that last one is a little funny. But the jokes and the scares are furthering the terrorists' aims, and they have to be laughing their butts off as we help them out trying to amuse ourselves.

The building evacuation in Connecticut cost $40,000 in decontamination efforts in addition to the money lost with the building closed. Police, fire and emergency service departments around the country are spending thousands of needless man-hours as they investigate each little "joke." The time tied up with practical jokes takes them away from more pressing, real-life emergencies. It also helps to increase the hysteria that leads to the banning of powdered-sugar covered doughnuts.

Damn, and I really like them things, too.