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?

At-Large Councilmember David A. Catania has done plenty over the past few years to piss off the pharmaceutical industry. He’s essentially declared war on high drug prices and fought for legislation to make drugs more affordable in the District. And more recently, the D.C. Council on Tuesday voted to proceed with his legislation that would tightly regulate drug sales representatives in the District.

Now Big Pharma is fighting back. Online and anonymously, anyway.

A Web site recently posted at bigpharmarealpeople.org names Catania “Big Pharma Enemy #1″ and attributes to him the following:

• “I want to ’shake the pharmaceutical industry to its core.’”
• “I am a Washington Lawyer whose sole purpose is to invent solutions to problems that don’t exist.”
• “If I am successful, hundreds of DC area residents will loose [sic] their jobs.”
• “I am an enemy to Big Pharma, big business and capitalism.”

Who’s behind the site? Good question: The site’s domain name was registered by a proxy service, making it impossible to trace who runs the site. The “Big Pharma Team” is listed as Managing Editor John Galt, Associate Editor Dagney Taggart, Editor Hugh Akston, and Editor Hank Reardon.

Those names should be familiar to anyone who went through an adolescent Ayn Rand phase: Those are the names of characters from that author’s Atlas Shrugged. (Note, however, that they misspelled “Dagny Taggart” and “Hank Rearden.”) E-mails to members of the “Big Pharma Team” were not immediately returned.

“It’s par for the course,” Catania says. “It’s the way the pharmaceutical industry, much like the the tobacco industry, chooses to engage in the arena of ideas. It’s name-calling.”

The site’s tagline is “Big Pharma is Real People, Saving Lives Is Our Business,” and it features sympathetic profiles of several drug company employees, none identified by their full name. A passage on the site says its purpose is to “point out how the news media, movie and entertainment industries lie and distort the facts when it comes to Big Pharma,” to “fight ridiculous Government rules and regulation that hamper Big Pharma from acting in the best interest of customers, patients and pharmacies,” and to “point out that corporations are not faceless, evil giants that take advantage of the individual.”

Have to say, guys—this anonymous Web site isn’t doing much to combat that whole “faceless” thing.

Catania does offer his kudos to the site’s creators in one respect: their taste in photography. The Web page features a photo of the councilmember dating back at least five years. “I’m flattered that they chose to use a picture that makes me look younger and more handsome,” he says.

Boswell, the great Baseball moralist, roasts Clemens. This says it all: “Clemens and Bonds now stand before us like twin symbols of the Steroid Age: cheats, liars, ego monsters who were not satisfied with mere greatness and wealth but, as they aged, had to pass everyone in the record book, break every mark and do it with outsize bodies, unrecognizable from their youth, that practically screamed, ‘Catch me if you can.’”

Wonkette posts a vid of Ron Paul fighting Hitler. Awesome or dull?

The Examiner reports the DC gov has to give $200,000 to Disney. It’s part of a new incentive program to keep Nicolas Cage from filming shitty movies in our town.

The Mitchell Report is out. To assist with the crushing of your fandom, City Desk has searched the 400-plus-page document for all Nats and Orioles players past and present named in the report. NB: The page numbers refer to the PDF numbering, not the numbers actually printed on the pages.

• former Orioles outfielder David Segui, p.198
• former Orioles outfielder Larry Bigbie, p.200
• former Nats pitcher Mike Stanton, p.205
• Orioles second baseman Brian Roberts, p.206
• former Orioles outfielder Jack Cust, p.207
• former Orioles catcher Tim Laker, p.207
• former Orioles pitcher Jason Grimsley, p.225
• former Orioles catcher Gregg Zaun, p.227
• former Orioles pitcher Todd Williams, p.242
• former Orioles pitcher Kent Mercker, p.246
• former Nats outfielder Jose Guillen, p.249
• former Oriole shortstop Miguel Tejada, p.249
• former Orioles infielder Jerry Hairston Jr., p.255
• Nats catcher Paul Lo Duca, p.256
• former Orioles pitcher Kevin Brown, p.262
• former Nats catcher Gary Bennett Jr., p.273
• former Orioles utility man Howie Clark, p.276
• Nats outfielder Nook Logan, p.277
• Orioles outfielder Jay Gibbons, p.295
• former Orioles pitcher Darren Holmes, p.299
• former Orioles outfielder Gary Matthews Jr., p.300

Most of the Orioles were named by former Mets clubhouse employee Kirk Radomski. The biggies, obviously are Roberts, Tejada (no surprise there, Mr. B12), Guillen, Logan, and Gibbons. Personally heartbreaking for this hardball fan is to see Bigbie’s name, who grew up in the same Indiana town as he did. (He did cooperate with investigators, so kudos for that, Larry.)

While staring at the ceiling in the small hours of this morning I came to a revelation about an old boyfiriend who was addicted to Nyquil. It was a doomed romance. He was my mechanic. He had not a stick of furniture (save for his childhood twin bed) in his sprawling apartment. He admitted rather casually one day that he had dabbled in meth. He had a daughter he never saw. But, truthfully, it was when I watched him guzzle electric blue cough medicine every night that I realized maybe he wasn’t the one.

Now that I’m married, I still feel pretty sure he maybe set the bar low. But having come down with a nasty bug and giving Nyquil a try for the first time, I’m thinking he may have been on to something. I’ve gone through a bottle and a half since Thanksgiving and there have been peaceful, restful nights of oblivion as a result. My cat pawing my head? Unfazed. My husband yanking the covers? Who cares? But I’m lately wondering if continued self-medication is the best idea I’ve ever had, hence detailed knowledge of my ceiling.

I keep having visions of this woman featured in the most wrenching of all episodes of A&E’s Intervention (and trust me, I’ve seen most of them). She’d go to bed cradling mouthwash, wake up and puke in the wastebasket in front of her husband and children, slug some more of it down, then tuck it under her pillow again for good luck.

How many steps away am I from that? I’m not sure, but tonight I think I’ll sleep on it.

In Monday’s WaPo, DeNeen L. Brown took a court hearing for Unifest crasher Tonya Bell as an opportunity to remind us of the lingering horrors of crack. Brown notes that the drug “has hung on, never really left.” She quotes Ron Strong, from the Justice Department’s National Drug Threat Assessment Unit, who says crack is still the primary drug concern in Washington. Instead of citing stats, she emotes: “Still, crack feels larger.”

The point of Brown’s impressionistic feature is hard to parse. Is she saying crack is resurging, just as bad as it ever was? It’s not really clear. Either way, she doesn’t turn to actual statistics to make her point. Recent national data doesn’t show much change in the levels of crack use in recent years. The percentage of Americans who’ve used the drug in the last month tends to hover around 0.2 or 0.3 percent. Percentages for lifetime use—anyone who’s tried the drug even just once—have stayed around 3.3 percent. According to crack expert Craig Reinarman, lifetime use hit about 4 percent at crack’s peak in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Reinarman, who I just reached on the phone, says Brown was right to note that crack hasn’t diminished nearly as much as our obsession with it—but she still draws all the wrong conclusions.

For one, her story makes the assumption that Tonya Bell drove through the crowd, laughing as she mowed people down, because of crack. But she doesn’t offer any proof of that connection. It’s a typical conflation of the effects of crack use with its potentially deeper causes. Few reporters have made the obvious connection that the people who use crack are often prone to frightening and irrational behavior long before they get hooked on the drug. Bell may well have plowed through the crowd in her Volvo if she’d turned to alcohol instead.

Brown pulls back from the small cause-and-effect case of Bell on crack and the Unifest tragedy to the big picture of crack and crime in D.C. She reminds us of just how much crime crack caused, citing the 479 homicides in 1991, the height of the crack surge here. She doesn’t bother to note that last year the district saw far fewer homicides: 169. If crack’s still here, big and strong, then where are all the bodies? Reinarman says the dip in crime has more to do with the crack market settling down. Dealers know their turf and have stopped fighting over borders. Seems to me there are other reasons as well—complicated ones about economics and gentrification.

Which leads me to the real cause-and-effect scenario. What reporters are afraid to say, and this is Reinarman’s pet peeve, is that poverty and marginalization cause people to turn to serious drug abuse and addiction. So while it’s tempting to blame the drug when people do desperate things, the truth usually has something to do with the fact that they were desperate in the first place.

Poverty, Reinarman says, is the underlying cause of most drug abuse in America. But that’s an uncomfortable little subject most of use would rather avoid.

They keep the water bongs out front at B & K News Stand in Adams Morgan, but sex and Tom Clancy, it seems, trump weed. For that you’ve got a pay a buck.

Several times during the past two weeks, I have stopped by the store looking, unsuccessfully, for the September issue of Outside.

Each time, after marveling that High Times isn’t the only stoner glossy, I’ve noticed the sign by the red saloon doors demanding a dollar to pass into the back room. Today, I paid up and took a look.

Here at City Paper, our spam filter doesn’t snag very many of the continual come-ons for penis enlargement, performance drugs, and all the rest. So I though I had a good idea of what was available.

Wrong. B & K has quite a collection of goods, from the traditional flesh-toned 19-inch double dong, to a shorter one that straps, inexplicably, to your chin. They also have the truly bizarre “clone a pussy,” a $39.99 plaster caster rip-off modeling set.

B & K might be a little late on their shipments of outdoor adventure mags, but their issues of Buttman and Tranny Times are contemporary, their collection of vintage Playboy and videos vast. The only pedestrian fare beyond the red doors is the rack of yellowed Clancy novels next to the stroke mags.

But why the special room? And why the dollar? I asked Tony, the guy behind the counter for an explanation. The entrance fee, he says, has something to do with window shoppers.

“You buy something you get your dollar back,” Tony says. “You just look I keep the dollar. It helps pay the rent.”

Fair enough. As a neighborhood museum of the bizarre, it might even warrant a buck.

No word yet on Whole Foods Market stores in D.C., but lucky longhairs in Maryland and Virginia may soon be able to duck out of the upscale food chain with baggies of…hemp pretzels.

And what better way to improve the taste of dough and salt than by adding a little rope material to the mix? It’s not just pretzels. The Pennsylvania company also promises hemp mustard, peanut-butter-and-hemp-filled nuggets, and a bunch of other treats. Personally, I’m looking forward to the hemp-seed baklava.

I went to the Lamond-Riggs Neighborhood Library over the weekend. According to the online catalogue, it was the only branch of the D.C. Public Library with a copy, actually three, of a book I’d been trying to get my hands on (the only historical account of amphetamine use in the U.S., if you must know).

I got to the library, hunted in the stacks and didn’t find my book. So I marched over to the librarian. She looked it up on her version of the catalog and scoffed. “Oh, this book is gone,” she said. “It’s old.”

The book hadn’t been reported missing or discarded, mind you. It was just really old—1975—and the library couldn’t be expected to hold onto old books. “We’re not an archive,” she said.

I can understand the necessity of thinning the stock every once in a while. A lot of crap gets published. And a lot of that crap gets quickly outdated. But this was a useful, semi-academic text. And no one has written anything like it since, so throwing it away actually blots out a speedy little chunk of history. And why, oh why, is it still in the catalog?!

Photographer Ivan Pierre Aguirre sent City Desk a pair of interesting shots he grabbed at 10th and K Streets NW a couple of weeks back. Ivan, a student photojournalist, came across a hidey-hole of sorts that seems to be a favorite place for local folks to indulge in a rock or two.

Share your pix of favorite neighborhood drug hangouts with us!

There are two ways that drug use gets covered by the American media. They either take a thoughtful approach to a complex problem or foster hysteria supported by quotes from cops and Drug Enforcement Administration officials.

This morning’s Washington Post takes both routes. In the front section, David Brown offers a well-documented examination of Baltimore’s massive reduction in drug addiction and overdose deaths. The recipe for this success, writes Brown, was the mixture of education, treatment, a needle-exchange program, and even training for addicts and their families in CPR and how to use naloxone, an injected medicine that can stave off an overdose death, à la Pulp Fiction. (Brown reports 194 total deaths have been avoided by the injection.)

Funding for these efforts, reports Brown, comes from Republican bogeyman George Soros. The kingpin has pumped $50 million into Baltimore in the last eight years.

Or you can just scare the shit out of people. A story on the front page of the Metro section by Michael E. Ruane and Paul Duggan liberally quotes a DEA spokesperson and Len Bias’ mother to tell readers that the Maryland basketball star’s 1986 death is the reason that cocaine use declined in subsequent years—and if we can just remind kids how dangerous coke is they won’t touch it. The words “treatment” and “education” do not appear.

Ruane didn’t immediately return a phone call, and Duggan won’t comment, but Brown says the two sections didn’t communicate before the stories ran. But just because they were different, he says, doesn’t mean one was right and one was wrong. “I thought [Ruane and Duggan's article] was a touching story about a very serious problem,” he says. “They’re two completely different stories; one is about scientific research on an entire population, and the other one is about essentially 100 pieces of anecdotal evidence of what happens when someone loses control of drug use.”

ADDENDUM, 7:05 P.M.: Former CP editor Jack Shafer points out that we called bullshit on the “legacy of grown-up children born to crack-addicted mothers, called crack babies,” years ago. Almost 15 years ago, in fact.

When the Washington Post gets it in its head to tell readers about a threatening new drug trend, there’s a general formula a reporter goes after. A good example is Amit R. Paley’s piece on the region’s (not-so)brewing meth epidemic. Paley has all the necessary elements: hysterical cops, worried public-health officials talking about the drug’s physiological effects, and a former addict to peg the story to.

By those standards, Theresa Vargas, in her B1 story yesterday on teens’ “rediscovery” of morning-glory seeds, goes 0 for 3, yet she managed to put together a 1,329-word story anyway.

Her piece, “A ‘60s Buzz Recycled: Teens Rediscover Morning Glories Can Be Used as a Hallucinogen,” tells us that the seeds were “popular in the hippie era of the 1960s…[and] seem to have sprouted once again.” The seeds may have been popular in the “hippie era,” but Vargas doesn’t give any evidence that they were—or, for that matter, whether they can actually get you high.

And Vargas definitely doesn’t offer any proof that kids swallowing morning-glory seeds ever went away. In fact, I had a friend that was eating them back in the mid-’90s, though I had my doubts about whether he ever actually tripped off them. The closest Vargas gets to a kid who actually tried the seeds is Matt Edelblute, a 16-year-old who said a friend of his has used ‘em.

Vargas didn’t strike out with the cops for lack of effort. After the jump, she reports that “law enforcement officials across the region” weren’t even aware a kid could get high off the seeds, that the Drug Enforcement Administration expressed ignorance, and that the National Institute on Drug Abuse said it didn’t know enough to comment. She even approached Lloyd Johnston, lead researcher for the federally funded Monitoring the Future survey. Johnston has dedicated his life to tracking drug trends among kids, and even he came up blank.

“I am afraid kids are ahead of me in that case,” he told Vargas.