Drug use

Smelly Tavales to the kids: "So you see, you don't have to pay me now. Use it for awhile. And if you like it, maybe want some more... I will be right here for you."

1987 promotional button

The use of drugs, specifically narcotics, is not a common element of Muppet culture, but it has been referenced, mostly in an indirect manner, on occasion. Allusions to drug use have been made both as a cautionary tale and for recreational means. The level of cultural acceptance of these practices has varied over the decades as — tobacco excepted — the legality of their use has evolved.

Cautionary

• A real subway ad for New York City's Fresh Air Fund (a low-income summer camp program for inner-city kids) seen in Christmas Eve on Sesame Street urges donors to "Turn kids on to real grass," in reference to "grass" as an era-specific slang term for marijuana.

• Jon Stone's script for Sesame Street Episode 2706 (aired in March 1990) titles Scene 3, "Just Say No," a reference to the Nancy Reagan-backed drug prevention campaign from the 1980s. The episode's antagonist, Smelly Tavales, is a disreputable dealer of words to whom the residents of Sesame Street must learn to "just say no" to.

• The cross-network special Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue teamed up characters from multiple franchises in order to take on the dangers of drug use in minors. The Muppet Babies are among a host of characters who participate in convincing the teenaged Michael to avoid the temptations of drug use, singing songs that extol the virtues of all the "Wonderful Ways to Say No."

• The second season Dinosaurs episode "A New Leaf" dealt with the Sinclair Family partaking in a leaf that makes them feel effusively happy until Fran realizes what it's done to their lives and moves to get her family in order.

• Dinosaurs addressed drugs again in the third season episode "Steroids to Heaven." Robbie takes Thornoids (equivalent to anabolic steroids) to impress Caroline Foxworth, but has raging mood swings and physical side effects.

• The title of the Bear in the Big Blue House song "Just Say Ow" references the "Just Say No" ad campaign.

• Carrot the Pony learns to "just say no" (to giving pony rides) in the Furchester Hotel episode "Pony in Disguise."

Recreation

Sam the Eagle from The World in which Kermit was Never Born.

"Life is full of highs" in The Muppets (2011)

Expired marshmallows may cause a hallucinogenic trip.

• The documentary Youth 68, among the other cultural divide and generation gap topics covered, examines drug use. Opinions range from the cautionary and disapproving to the more casually accepting. Jack Margolis, whose book A Child's Garden of Grass would come out the next year, is interviewed as one of those supportive of recreational marijuana use.

• Sesame Street used The Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" during its first season. Although no direct allusions to drug use are made, it was a widely-held belief that the song suggested a connection with psychedelics. Sesame Street creator Joan Ganz Cooney noted, "we had to take that off of the air because that turned out to stand for LSD, or at least was thought it did." 
• The late night audience of Saturday Night Live observed the cast from The Land of Gortch engaging in various adult activities, including Wisss smoking craters like a bong.

• Although a hookah can be used to smoke a number of substances, its use is often associated with opium and other often prohibited materials. On The Muppet Show, an Arabian Whatnot can be seen smoking a hookah in episode 413 during Dizzy Gillespie's number "Swing Low Sweet Cadillac" set in a bath house. In his 1979 memoirs To Be, or... Not to Bop, Gillespie recalled his own recreational drug use: "When I came to New York in 1937, I didn't drink nor smoke marijuana. 'You gonna be a square, muthafucka!' Charlie Shavers said and turned me on to smoking pot... Jazz musicians, the old ones and the young ones, almost all of them that I knew smoked pot, but I wouldn't call that drug abuse."

• The use of a hookah by Floyd Pepper (playing the Caterpillar) in episode 506 elicits a slightly closer association with narcotics use in connection with analyses of Alice in Wonderland as Lewis Carroll's metaphor for the whimsical Wonderland as a drug-induced state. It's also one of the earliest overt associations of a member of the Electric Mayhem with substance use.

• The "Muppet Odd Squad" sketch from Muppets Tonight episode 202 features Rick Moranis as "Little Ricky Cool" co-starring with Andy and Randy Pig as early-1970s anti-establishment bank robbers who are caught by the cops (played by Kermit, Clifford, and Spamela Hamderson). When Ricky complains that the situation has turned into a "bad trip," Clifford responds, "You think this is a bad trip? Try driving to Yosemite with a car full of kids."

• Club Dot from The World in which Kermit was Never Born as seen in It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie contains several instances of unruly behavior with strong suggestions that harder drugs are being used at the night club. This universe's version of Sam the Eagle advances on Kermit with glow sticks while sucking on a pacifier, a practice used by ecstasy users to offset the effects of involuntary teeth grinding. Scooter is shown cage dancing in the scene with his pupils contorted, suggesting that he has partaken in substances associated with the rave environment.

• The lyrics of "Life's a Happy Song" contain a number of examples of the enjoyable activities that make life a joyous affair. People from different walks of life and career paths have contrasting views on what that means to them. A 1960s-throwback hippie seated on the sidewalk between a Rexall drug store and a Chinese food restaurant declares, "life is full of highs." This fits both of the Merriam-Webster definitions of "high": "filled with or expressing great joy or excitement" or "excited or stupefied by or as if by a drug."

• Kermit admits in The Muppets 2015 Presentation Pilot that everyone will be upset when they find out the show won't be going forward. "Except the band. They're always happy. Legally now." Medicinal use of marijuana in California was made legal in 1996, and recreationally the year after this pilot was released. The same joke was used when the show went to air in the second episode, "Hostile Makeover," when Scooter tells Bobo the band would be happy to buy his cookies. Bobo: "Those guys are always happy!" Scooter: "Yeah. Legally now."

• Nora and the Electric Mayhem undergo their own psychedelic trips from expired marshmallows in The Muppets Mayhem episode "Break On Through." The group experiences a number of hallucinogenic tropes while in the desert. While there was no push back from the studio on the sequence, in order to maintain the show's family-friendly tone and staying in-character for the Muppets, the writers made the trip accidental. Writer/producer Jeff Yorkes explained: "They weren't necessarily, like, 'Hey, here's a marshmallow that’s going to make you trip, let’s eat it!' It was an accident."

• The Muppets Mayhem additionally features a number of references to "420," alluding to cannabis culture. The Mayhem's advance to produce an album for Wax Town Records is $420,000, as stated in the premiere episode. In the same episode, the number is seen as the address to Danny Trejo's house. In "The Times They Are A-Changin'," when Nora starts watching their old tapes, the VCR clock is set at 4:20. A peace symbol marks April 20th on the calendar seen in "Eight Days a Week." According to Bill Barretta, the Muppet performers pushed back on some of the writer's "4/20 references and things like that" stating that the performers felt some of the jokes were unnecessary or they were just going for an easy or cheap laugh. Barretta commented "These characters were created in the '70s, by people who were living in the '70s and living that life. That’s where they come from, so I think they’ve always walked that line of 'just be careful where you’re going, so that everybody can enjoy them.'"

Notes

In response to assumptions that Jim Henson and his creative team made use of drugs in order to achieve the levels of wacky antics of the Muppets, and especially The Land of Gortch, biographer Brian Jay Jones interviewed Henson's colleagues for Jim Henson: The Biography:

“While Jerry Nelson and Richard Hunt were known to sneak away to pass a joint back and forth, the Muppet crew was, for the most part, fairly straitlaced. [Frank] Oz wasn't a partier at all—he found large gatherings too noisy—and Jim, while he might enjoy a glass of wine or two from time to time and maybe, said Nelson, "a little grass"—rarely ingested anything more potent than aspirin. He had, however, tried LSD exactly once and, if asked, would probably confess that it had been something of a disappointment.”

The book goes on to detail Henson's one (failed) experiment with LSD in relation to his attempts to establish a psychedelic nightclub during the 1960s and his experience making Youth 68.

See also

• Muppets imbibing alcohol
• Smoking Muppets