“Now where did I put that letter from the innertubes?” — photo by Aaron Short

The Bushwick Community Board’s (CB4) bright orange newsletter came in the mail the other day. The cover as always directs residents to check out the Board’s out of date Geocities website: enjoy calendar events titled September 2006 but which are actually from November 2005 — and the Agenda from May 2008. Doing some research on 2005 street closings? Check here. Yes, the CB4 site is a wealth of expired information.

This is to be expected of an organization whose average age is somewhere around 70. Half of them have probably never even heard of the internet. But the ones who have are only savvy by comparison — the newsletter seems to have reprinted a debunked urban myth, passing it off as urgent news.

“There is a new drug known as ‘strawberry quick,’” the headline screams in bold. The segment warns of “a type of crystal meth going around that looks like strawberry pop rocks…it also smells like strawberry and it is being handed out to kids in school yards.” It goes on to claim that children have ingested it and have been rushed to the hospital “in dire condition.” My immediate assumption was that this had happened here in Bushwick or New York. My second thought was to look it up.

According to Snopes, pink meth is being sold. Everything else — that it smells or tastes like strawberry, that it fizzes in the mouth, and most notably and emphatically on the part of the Snopes researchers, that it is being given to small children — is determined to be false. I found all of this out in about 45 seconds. It takes a lot longer to lay out even CB4′s amateurish newsletter, and then print and mail it. But why stop and think when you could propagate unsubstantiated hysteria about “The Children”? I’d think Bushwick’s parents have enough to worry about without this drama.

Maybe it’s just that the bitties at CB4 don’t know what a search engine is. It’s completely within the realm of likelihood. But this is just another event in the continuing saga of the Bushwick Community Board’s irrelevance.