Suffice to say, we at CDM discourage pirating music. I should hasten to add, though, that we’re also generally opposed to terrorism, illegal firearms, and narcotics — just in case there’s any doubt. According to a training film produced by the National District Attorneys Association and Recording Industry Association of America, and leaked on the Interwebs (doh!), these things typically go hand in hand.

In the course of the film, the producers do stumble upon an interesting solution to the issue of sagging sales of physical CDs:

“There are some sayings in certain parts of the jurisdiction when you buy a CD, ‘would you like it with or without’,” Walters adds. “The ‘with’ is a CD enclosing a piece of crack or whatever the case may be. We, continually, in working with law enforcement, find that these locations have everything from handguns to large quantities of narcotics.”

Reviewing the RIAA’s “Reefer Madness” for the digital age [Ars Technica]

Wow, free crack with my pirated CD? This lends an entirely new layer to our ongoing coverage of the future of the compact disc.

All of this seems doubly peculiar when mixed with the RIAA’s anti-piracy campaign, which has been largely directed at online music piracy. It’s hard to squeeze in narcotics with a torrent.

But, since I know a lot of our readers are from outside the United States and have a terrifyingly skewed opinion already of, say, life in New York, let me say, for the record, I have never gotten a free handgun with a CD. Really. I am right now not hearing a stream of bullets being fired. I also weigh less than five hundred pounds, and I don’t own an SUV. I can take you to some cool record stores in town, and I promise the discs are both legal and drug-free. And we’re spending CDM’s donation drive proceeds on bandwidth and servers, not my crack habit. Come visit America. Once you clear that whole fingerprinting / retinal scan / whatever, it’s a good time. Okay?