The Erowid Crew has been making a lot of progress on the Shulgin Collection archiving project. There is still scanning and digitizing happening, but the majority of Erowid person time right now is on the preliminary “metadata” step, where each item is quickly looked at and assigned a document type, name, date, and evaluated for privacy/redaction. More about this soon.
While metadataing, Trout came across a series of news clippings Sasha saved in 1974. Trout felt compelled to write the following requiem. It’s interesting both for the weird story told in the “news” series, to show Sasha’s meticulous collection of articles about psychoactives he found interesting, and to document the way the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times covered it. Enjoy :]
A Requiem for Marty
by Keeper Trout, August 2022
Marty never had a chance. He had the might of the San Jose police department out to get him. Ideally alive but it was not required. They had tried everything. Even going so far as to use sex to lure him into a trap. Nothing had been working to catch the elusive rodent. Few mice can say that they’ve eluded the police for months and have also found themselves discussed in multiple news articles.
Marty’s crime was portrayed as being a drug addict but we never were able to learn Marty’s true relationship to drugs. Calling him Marty the Marijuana Mouse, suggests a preference for cannabis. Clearly he liked weed and had apparently sampled cocaine and PCP. At one point it was suggested that he was going to move on to heroin but we would have heard about it if he had done so.
Eventually Marty was caught. Not with the hare-brained idea of introducing a female mouse variously said to be named “Mata Hairy” or “Mona” but by removing the drugs from the evidence room and baiting a live animal trap with weed seeds.
Once trapped, Marty found his behavior ascribed to his imagined drug-deprived mania. It was said he needed to be placed into a glass box containing nothing at all to prevent him from harming himself by frantically trying to escape. One officer suggested they may need to give him a little cannabis to get him through detox.
For the crimes commonly associated with being a mouse, death is a common punishment. Instead, Marty got life imprisonment, following rehabilitation. His detox and rehab were said to be provided by a local college professor but the details of how that was to be done were not made clear.
He was said to be the “narcotic squad’s mascot”; “Marty M. Mouse”. Their very own imprisoned drug-deprived former drug user, serving a life sentence after being booked for “possession of marijuana, use of narcotics and destruction of evidence”.
A snap-trap somehow sounds kinder.
True story.
San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, 12 Dec., 1974. Mouse on Hard Stuff.
San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, 19 Dec., 1974. Cops Desperate — A Turn-On for Junkie Mouse.
San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, 24 Dec., 1974. Mouse Caught in the Grass.
Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, 24 Dec., 1974. p. 1: Intensive Hunt Ends With Mouse Going to Seed, p.3: Marty M. Mouse Has Monkey on His Back When Caught.
See also https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/marty_marijuana_mouse/
