This is dedicated to David.

There was a time when I was young and innocent, an introverted yet bright 5th grade pupil of St. James School in Lakewood, Ohio. In addition to the standard curriculum and my band practices, I was also a boy scout juggling a paper route. In a word, I was busy…

…and then I met David. David was everything I wanted to be: a dreamer, a leader, a rebel. It was he that first introduced me to pogs and he that worked to feed my lust for the cardboard disks. I used to think it was David's skills of persuasion that led me down the dark road, but now I know it was the paper-made seductress herself that turned me.

It began casually, a Simpsons pog here or there, maybe a Lion King one…but it was only a matter of time before I was strung out on Poison and 8-Ball and chasing it with a Ying Yang. From there I moved to the harder stuff, slammers of all shapes and sizes.

Ripping my mother's sofa apart looking for lost coins, rifling through my schoolmates' cubby holes for a quick pick-me-up…those were dark times for me. Now that I am clean and sober I can talk openly about my experience, but back then I might have killed a man for telling me off.

The Brief History of Pogs:

The exact origin of pogs is debatable, but the story supported by the most evidence is that they were invented by prison inmates in the late 1800s as an escape from the horrors of jail. Circular stones were first used, but due to popularity other inmates quickly developed means of fashioning the original cardboard pogs from the covers of books in the jail library. Similar to baggy pants, pogs quickly spilled out into the streets as a romantic sport, played for high stakes on street corners and in pog dens across America. The photograph below shows a group of men playing with original pogs:

As my case clearly illustrates, pogs would soon find their way into the suburbs, where rich white children ate it up like candy. In fact pogs were often branded with images to attract children:

Pog labs across America switched priorities and focused on the youth market, though by no means wrote off the OPs (original pogstas) that made the game what it was…

It would be years before the American government recognized the growing threat posed by pogs, but Ronald Reagan finally took the initiative to declare a War on Pogs. The ever beautiful Nancy Reagan would take her husband's message to the streets and even made an appearance on the then popular prime-time comedy, Diffrent Strokes. The "Just Say No" message has been mocked over the years as being overly-simple, but there has been progress in the war. Below is an LAPD photograph from a raid on a pog lab:

The number of pog labs and dens across the country has dwindled in recent years, but law enforcement estimates there are at least 1,000 labs and twice as many dens still in operation. The war continues…

Some say the biggest advancement in the war on pogs came with the pog-deaths of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, but no official connection has been made. Shakur's famous "Pog Life" tattoo across the abs is a statement to the game's hold on the culture of the early to mid '90s.

As for me…

My wakeup call came when I arrived at school to find a media circus and flashing lights in the parking lot. David was found by a teacher, dead with a Poison slammer down his throat and a litter of pogs around his body. They called it a pog deal gone-bad but I knew what really happened. He always told me he wanted out, a new lease on life…but the addiction was just too strong. David killed himself that morning as a message to me, a message to all of us…Friends don't let friends play pogs.