The MPD established a drug free zone for the duration of July in Brightwood Park. A heavy MPD presence followed the red fliers (re: lots of white guys in flak jackets making more trouble for the neighborhood than the dealers they replaced), and now the dealers have gone back to work in front of the corner take-out at 5th and Kennedy.

Evidence that things in the neighborhood are back to normal and that the drug free zone was a waste of (non-recycled?) paper: I walked off the bus yesterday and into a heated public dispute over the price of joints. The seller wanted $15 each, the buyer only wanted to pay $10. There was some yelling, some good dealer/bad dealer, some bravado-fueled hustling, but then they settled on $12 a joint, and everybody walked away with what he wanted. And, I might add, no one gave a shit that I saw it all go down.

I realized after watching yesterday’s exchange that the atmosphere of danger–at least in Brightwood Park–is as much a  product of the MPD’s presence as it is the viral hopelessness that they established generations ago with their crackdowns. In the few months that my girlfriend and I have lived in the neighborhood, we’ve only been scared a handful of times. The first was when red fliers showed up–overnight it seemed–on every light pole in the neighborhood. The second time was when we watched eight cops in five cars bust a teenager for selling pot outside a convenience store.

In other words, we didn’t feel threatened until the cops showed up and told us to feel threatened.

The idea that cops are the problem contradicts theories that a heavy police presence discourages crime, but truth be told, I’ve almost always felt safer in the company of drug dealers than cops. Supra-citizenship lends itself to abuse, but drug dealers–at least the small-timers in our neighborhood–are live-and-let-live capitalists who have a stake in maintaining some sort of neighborhood equilibrium; while cops have every reason to stir shit up.

D.C. hotels: They’re good for more than just prostitutes. Sometimes, there’s drugs! Ray-J got busted at the Hyatt Regency on New Jersey Avenue NW this week while trying to hide his alleged stash of marijuana and “boat,” a drug too cool for me to have ever heard of it. Hotel staffers showed Kim Kardashian’s co-star the door, but his security detail got there first and ushered him out before the cops were called, says Hotel Chatter. —Jule Banville

I just stopped by Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest, hoping to talk to kids about the breaking news that at least one of their own is suspected in connection with a mostly-suburban drug ring with “plans” to sell marijuana to high school students. After finding more than $6,000 in cash and more than three pounds of marijuana in one student’s home (which leads me to believe the “plans” had already been realized), Montgomery County police arrested two students, from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac and Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, and two adults. More arrests were promised–potentially at Wilson. Police said they were proud they caught the little buggers before they had a chance to sell any drugs. Um, right.

Anyway, I figured this news would be the talk of the town at Wilson. Even though the campus was relatively busy this afternoon, I found only one student who’d heard anything. The gossip, she said, was something about “a white, 17-year-old girl” involved with selling drugs with kids from Maryland. The rest of the students I talked to were more concerned about another police action on campus today: the closure of Fort Reno park due to high arsenic levels in the soil. According to a group of students sitting on some steps at a business across from the school, at about 1:30 p.m., the park was their favorite place to ditch class. Now where will they go???

I understand their frustration. When I was in high school, we would sneak away to a place called Hamburger Mary’s in Portland. We would order home fries, douse them with Tabasco, nurse coffees and smoke Marlboro Reds. I was really not that much of a rebel, so we only skipped during assemblies or when we’d done something to make showing up in class riskier than getting caught skipping. When Hamburger Mary’s closed, we were distraught. We tried going to the fancier brew pub down the street, but the waiters quickly caught onto our game and gave us a time limit. The next year, our school started locking the doors during assemblies. That meant we actually had to go. And they were really, really bad. Wilson students, I feel your pain.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy released a “study” last week arguing, essentially, that teenage pot smoking causes mental illness. The NDCP seems to trot out one of these reports every year or so, often citing data showing an increased risk of mental illness among youth who smoked reefer. I called bullshit on that alleged causal link last week. My argument is better made in a new study from the British Home Office, cautioning against the temptation to draw find a cause and effect relationship between cannabis use and increased risk of mental illness.

“An association between cannabis use and the subsequent development of a psychotic illness does not necessarily indicate a causal relationship in either individuals or populations. The onset of schizophrenia usually occurs in the late teens or early twenties; and it is at this age that cannabis use is most prevalent. A temporal association – which may not necessarily be a causal one – is therefore almost inevitable”

The authors note later that other factors might be at play, “such as a common predisposition to schizophrenia and also to cannabis use.” Meaning, people destined to develop schizophrenia may also be the kind of people who smoke pot in high school. Not so hard to believe. As for the potential impact of the mental health menace that is marijuana, the study notes that very few young pot smokers (in the UK anyway) will go on to develop a psychotic illness. According to their research, “around 5,000 young men, or 20,000 young women, would need to be prevented from using cannabis to avoid one person developing schizophrenia.”

Last night on WUSA’s 11 o’clock news, Brett Haber ended his sports report by showing portions of a cutesy commercial designed to prevent anabolic steroid use.

The animated clip began with several sports balls sort of hanging out together in a locker room. One by one, the balls deflate, as a narrator goes over the alleged harmful side-effects of steroid abuse (”damage kidneys, destroy the liver - even cause heart attacks and strokes”).

The money shot comes with the biggest orb in the bunch, the basketball, shriveling into a small pea just as the narrator says , “Not to mention something else they can do to a guy’s body.”

Get it, kids? STEROIDS WILL SHRIVEL YOUR BALLS!

Turns out the clip is called “Shrinking,” and was a public service announcement produced in early 2006 by the Partnership for a Drug Free America, a governmental body, with support from Major League Baseball.

The same message, of course, is implied — with much greater impact, I must say — by Dead Balls Era™. That’s the slogan I and I alone feel is the best name for the homerific and drug-addled period that baseball is now allegedly crawling out from.

My three-plus-years crusade to get Dead Balls Era™ accepted by the cultural mainstream, or anybody else, has been a failure.

I just Googled “Dead Balls Era™”: Five hits.

That’s less than “Dead Balls Era™” got five months ago, when I last wrote about how few Google hits “Dead Balls Era™ was getting..

I’m not givin’ up.

In Sunday’s Post Magazine, Liza Mundy takes on the age-old question of what parents should tell their children about their youthful indiscretion. Mundy thinks her generation of new moms, who grew up in the 1970s, may have more shocking tales than previous cadres of ‘rents. Having grown up in the 1980s, raised by radicals who still put my rebellion to shame, I can tell you that’s just plain wrong. (And what if your parents were Dadaists? Sheesh!)

Mundy also exposes her own vanilla transgressions. These days, groan, she says we know so much more about how scary drugs and alcohol can be. Weed is stronger, addiction runs in families. And: “there are other drugs — ecstasy, crack, crystal meth — that are totally terrifying.” Wah? First of all, crack is way scarier than ecstasy. Way. It’s not nearly as habit forming and isn’t linked to nearly as much violence. And also, meth was plenty available in the 1970s when Mundy was playing foosball in the rec room. Just read all the freaked out New York Times stories sounding the alarm about speed freaks in San Francisco and Greenwich Village. Her own mom might have finished all the housework with the help of Dexedrine, aka, Mama’s Little Helper.

I think Mundy sort of whiffs on her ending. She says, “For the most part, though — let’s face it — anything we did occurred so long ago that it wasn’t really us who did it.” Bull! It was you just as much as it’s going to be your daughter tripping on ecstasy in her dorm room. Maybe next time she’ll try crack, since Mom thought it was the same as X.

That said, I don’t think Mundy’s question is invalid. I used to wish my old man had hidden the truth a bit more. Parents obviously have to make a decision based on how wild they really were, and how open-minded they want their own children to be. My dad’s decision turned me into a bit of a teetotaler at the beginning of high school, right when most of my friends were already crashing keggers. I waited to experiment until I was more mature, during my senior year. I think I turned out okay.

In the market for a cut-rate home ownership opportunity in the Brightwood Park area?

Check out this 1,500-square-foot row house at 714 Madison Street NW. According to Jenny Lynch—a spokesperson for bid4assets.com, the company auctioning off the house—the home was forfeited to the federal government as “a result of a conspiracy to distribute cocaine.”

Features include “hardwood floors, a fireplace on the ground level, three bedrooms, two and one-half bathrooms and an additional recreation room. There is a finished basement with a common area/recreation room, kitchenette and full bathroom. There is a parking area for two or more cars in rear of property.”

Interested? Bids start at $230,000. You need to deposit 10 percent of that in order to participate when bidding starts on March 17.

More info after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

This week a main topic on regular talk radio has been the Pew Center study that found we put more people in jail than any nation on the planet. Even the Chinese are stunned by our numbers.

Last night, meanwhile, a main topic on JT the Brick’s nationally syndicated sportstalk show (heard locally on WTEM-AM) was about whether Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds would go to jail first. While I was listening, neither the callers nor the host mentioned the Pew findings, or questioned the wisdom of spending government resources to police athletics.

And while the country’s mood seems to be in favor of imprisoning athletes who allegedly lied about taking performance enhancing drugs under oath: Self-described clean cycling activist Matt DeCanio, a product of Orange County, Va., has started a petition to have the feds investigate Lance Armstrong for the very same crimes that public officials are trying to put Clemens and Bonds away for.

Makes sense to me.

Leonard Shapiro, confined to the Washington Post website after decades in the home-deliverable version, weighed in on last week’s steroid circus on Capitol Hill yesterday afternoon.

Perhaps a bit late, but Shapiro’s piece is redeemed by how many words he devotes to trashing Rep. Dan Burton.

The Indiana Republican, remember, so fawned over Roger Clemens that the disgraced pitcher probably left the Rayburn Building with a “palpable mass on his buttocks” like that discussed in the hearing, only this one was from Burton’s lips.

The performance inspired Shapiro:

“Maybe it takes one slime-bucket to know another one.

After all, according to published reports, [Burton] is the same man who, while married to his first wife in the 1980s, fathered an illegitimate child after an affair with an employee of an Indiana state agency. He’s also been accused of sexual harassment in the workplace, including the alleged groping of a lobbyist from Planned Parentood in the mid-1990s when she visited his office.

Salon, the internet magazine, reported in a 1995 profile on Burton that several sources indicated the Congressman “has also maintained sexual relationships with women on his Congressional and campaign payrolls.”

This is the same Dan Burton widely criticized by his home town Indianapolis Star newspaper for missing countless votes on the House floor while playing in a number of charity golf tournaments on the PGA Tour.

In 1997, he was the guest of the AT&T chairman and CEO in a practice round before the PGA Tour’s annual Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Three weeks earlier, he had assumed chairmanship of a House committee that had approval over a legislative agency soon to award $5 billion in government contracts for long distance and local telecommunication services, with AT&T one of the companies trying to get a large piece of that action. AT&T reportedly also hosted a campaign fundraiser for him that week at a local restaurant.

This is the same Dan Burton who has been accused for many years of unethical campaign fundraising practices, a bullying, seemingly buffoonish Congressman, the Chicago Tribune once editorialized was a “crude, crass man who is a disgrace to his district, his state, his party and the House.”

Now THAT’s sportswriting!

Last night, I awoke in the darkness to the sound of a low buzzing near my ear. A woman who was temporarily sleeping in my apartment was attempting to reach me by telephone. Though I questioned why she had called me from such close proximity, I answered.

“Hello,” I said.

“I found a mouse,” the woman informed me. As we were both stationed within the apartment, I could hear her voice clearly without the aid of the telephone. Still, we did not abandon the mechanism. “It ran under a pile of clothes,” she added.

Months earlier, my landlord spoke of a similar class of rodents that had invaded his home in search of shelter and food scraps. He informed me that though he had once been pestered by the vermin, he and his housemates had since been able to systematically locate, isolate, and delete the creatures. A housemate explained one particularly cruel game they had played: “All I had to do was corner the mouse into the sink,” she said. “Then, I took hold of the spray faucet and shot the mouse until it had drowned.”

I did not relate this to the woman over the telephone. “What should I do?” she asked me.

Several years ago, while living in the Los Santos province of Panama, I found the helix of my ear caught between the jaws of a large and brazen rat. I had been sleeping soundly at the time–lost in the midst of a strange, hallucinatory dream, the specifics of which I do not recall–when the rat approached, squeaked violently, and bit. After the modest flow of blood from my head confirmed that I was not, in fact, still hallucinating, I located a man outside my domicile for help. The man offered me illicit drugs, an oversized conch shell with which to conceal a gaping, rat-friendly hole in my bedroom wall, and an outdoor hammock as a temporary bed. I accepted two of his offers.

Back in my apartment, I considered the mouse. I had no drugs, nor shells; my sole hammock was folded deep within my closet, out of use during the cool winter months.

“Sleep on the futon,” I suggested to the woman. “I will call my landlord in the morning.”

There has been a fascinating and ugly debate taking place in the City Desk comments section lately between Lance Armstrong’s defenders and his detractors.

It started in a thread about the steroid circus now going on in the halls of Congress, when Betsy Andreu, wife of one of Lance’s former cycling partners, alleged that Armstrong has tried to ruin her life for saying that she heard him admit to doctors that he had used performance enhancing drugs.

Andreu’s comments brought a strong rebuttal from Tim Herman, a lawyer for Armstrong in a 2004 fraud case surrounding Andreu’s allegations about Armstrong’s drug use. (Both Andreu and Herman confirmed in interviews that the posts on the City Paper board are indeed theirs.)

Herman’s rebuttal has since been dissected and rerebutted piece by piece by Andreu and a horde of mostly anonymous anti-Lance posters. Somebody posting as MSM inserted a link into the thread for a really, really fascinating and really, really ugly Mp3 of a phone conversation between America’s first golden-boy cyclist, Greg LeMond, and Stephanie McIlvain, who testified in that case that she didn’t hear Armstrong admit to using performance enhancers.

In the conversation, which was taped surreptitiously — McIlvain at one point asks if it’s being recorded, and LeMond assures her it’s not — McIlvain confesses that she was in fact in the room with Andreu when Armstrong admitted using the drugs.

The fear and contempt LeMond and McIlvain have for Armstrong and his lobby makes the conversation gripping, despite the low-fi quality of the recording. LeMond alleges that Armstrong is out to ruin him, and says that before “I have 17 years of my life destroyed by Lance, I will go down fighting!”

There’s likely nothing new contained in the allegations posted here. All the events alleged to have taken place in the thread took place a long time ago, if at all — the confession of drug use that Andreu says she heard from Armstrong was in the mid-1990s. The LeMond/McIlvain tape has been making the rounds in the cycling underbelly since at least last fall.

But, the passion in this thread makes it clear that the suspicions about Armstrong’s cleanliness as an athlete aren’t going to go away soon. And with what’s taking place across town right now — with federal lawmakers ready and eager to go back in time to investigate cheating and drug use charges in baseball and football —
by the end of the LeMond/McIlvain conversation, listeners are left with one big question:

Hey, Congress: When’s Lance Armstrong Coming?

Last week, I wrote a blog post about the removal of pairs of shoes from trees and street lights in Shaw, and the various ideas flying around about the symbolism of the shoes. One theory is that the shoes mark gang territory; Another is that they are used as memorials to lost friends; One more is that they identify drug houses. These conflicting ideas were often recorded with deep conviction (read: self-righteous dogmatism) on the Police Third District listserv. Example: after one poster wrote in support of the gang territory theory, another posted, “It’s very obvious that you are not an expert on this topic, sir.” Then, with great wisdom and compassion, the writer enlightened the listserv: “The kids I have tried to discourage from doing this were hanging shoes on telephone lines to honor the memory of a deceased friend who they held in high regard. Not every little neighborhood kid is in a gang or a crew.”

In the end, no one idea emerged as the absolute truth. But, I wanted to get to the bottom of this. I made some calls to the Ward 2 representatives in the Mayor’s Office of Community Relations and Services (MOCRS). They were working on the shoe removal. Unfortunately, the MOCRS guys didn’t call me back too quickly. But, somehow through the grapevine, two other men heard what I was doing and called me to set me straight.

ANC 2C01 Commissioner Alexander Padro rang first: “I grew up in the Bronx. I knew that shoes hanging from lampposts and trees [identified] where a drug house was, and that’s where you go for the action.” Padro says he’s called the Department of Public Works several times over the years to report hanging shoes. He’s noticed a lot of shoes on the 400 block of Q Street. “I’ve talked to people who walk on the block or live on the block, they think there’s a message: this place belongs to us.”

Then, Steven Cox from local anti-violence group Root Inc. called. “So, what do you think the shoes represent?” I asked. “Well, let’s get past the “think” part,” he responded, “I know exactly what’s going on here.” Or something to that effect. “You know how people say ‘he got smoked out of his shoes,’” continued Cox, well apparently, the shoes often belong to murdered victims of gang violence. The perp lobs the shoes up to show his gang is unafraid and willing to kill. Grim stuff–and utterly different from Padro’s claim.

So, who’s not down with the DC streets? “As far as theories, there’s not one specific theory [driving the removal],” says mayoral spokesperson Dena Iverson. Her office heard various complaints at community meetings and via e-mail, and decided the best thing to do was just take down the shoes. So, I guess there’s my answer, if I were to consider the Mayor’s Office of Communications the ultimate authority on gang activities. I still think the full truth has yet to emerge.

Yesterday, Rep. Tom Davis was among the lawmakers demanding further investigation of Miguel Tejada.

Davis et al want to know if Tejada lied when he said he didn’t use performance enhancing drugs. Pretty soon, they’re going to get a chance to entrap Roger Clemens.

Well, if Congress has decided that the sports world is where the government’s investigative powers are most needed, and is so eager to turn its hearings into episodes of “Moment of Truth,”, and is really intent on clearing up questions about who’s using what performance enhancers, well, why stop with Tejada and Clemens?

Why stop with baseball?

Why not go after the Biggest Kahuna of all the alleged drug cheats: Lance Armstrong?

Unlike Tejada, Armstrong has represented America and been named to various White House panels.

By the evidentiary standard used in the Mitchell Report — where, basically, if one hanger on says you’re guilty, you’re guilty — Armstrong looks a helluva lot guiltier than Clemens.

So let’s really get this show going. Bring in Lance Armstrong and put him under oath.

Or, better yet, stop the circus…

It’s the end of the year, so these commercials are showing up a lot more often:

Like a lot of ex-smokers, I tried a lot of different methods of quitting smoking before something finally took about four years ago. Patches never did much for me, though I do fondly remember the pleasantly woozy buzz you can get from smoking on the patch, something I did numerous times and has probably in itself shaved more years off my life than my decade-long pack-a-day habit. (What finally worked for me? I bought a house. There’s nothing like assuming boatloads of debt to put all the crap you waste money on into clear focus.)

All of which is to say I’m not a particularly good source for advice on how to quit smoking, but local artist Jackie Hoysted has a helpful list of tips today on her Ashes to Ashes blog. Hoysted, the subject of an August City Paper story, has been quit since July, documenting her withdrawal on the blog and in her artwork; you can see her coffin-nail-inspired pieces here.

In 2003, the federal government declared DC “does not have a serious problem” with meth amphetamine.

I’m no epidemiologist or addiction expert. But I’m gonna say: DC still doesn’t have a serious meth problem.

At least, not like Bakersfield’s meth problem. After years of hearing how evil the drug is, I’ve finally seen a place crushed by it.

I visited Bakersfield, a flat, dirty town about two hours north of Los Angeles, a couple weekends ago.

Not for its meth present, but for its musical past.

It’s the birthplace of the Bakersfield Sound, a brand of hardcore country music, pioneered by Buck Owens and fellow Bakersfielder Merle Haggard, that inspired the Beatles (here they cover Buck at Shea Stadium) and Stones and Dwight Yoakam and pretty much all good country rock.

I went there with friends to go to Owens’ old recording studio, located just outside city limits in Oildale, a sad dustbowlers’ destination. He was for years the bandleader on “Hee Haw,” and recorded the musical backing for that show in this West Coast studio, then he and other players in the cast would fake strum and lip-sync over during the videotaping sessions in Nashville.

Owens died two years ago, and his studio has gone pretty much to seed and is barely in operation. We were told that Owens’ old equipment, all sorts of Fender Tweed amps and red-white-and-blue Telecasters, still sits on pallets behind some locked doors next to the main room. Much as we asked, we weren’t allowed to see this goldmine. (We did, however, get a glimpse of a gold record for, ahem, Korn, which recorded its debut here, the last big album to come out of the studio.)

But, again, this town isn’t just about music anymore. It’s about meth amphetamine, too.

“Tweakers,” as the meth heads are known, are as much a part of the landscape as dirt. And this, remember, is where Steinbeck set much of “Grapes of Wrath.”

Young tweakers, old tweakers, tweener tweakers. They’d ride past the studio on teeny little bikes, which the sound engineer told us are part of the meth culture: The last possession a tweaker sells is his bike, because the car goes early, but he still needs some sort of wheels to get to where more meth is. It was a freak show. (Owens’ old nightclub, which is still open and quite popular, is called the Crystal Palace, but that’s gotta be a coincidence.)

On a trip to a 7/11 in early one evening, it occurred to me that every other customer in the crowded store was wasted on something other than booze. The zombies in the original “Night of the Living Dead” showed more life than this bunch. I can’t get that scene out of my head since coming back.

And it’s made me wonder: Why hasn’t meth hit DC like this?