Why are slashes automatically stripped from db result?

Hey all. I'm storing some jpeg images in a mysql database using the PEAR classes. Before inserting the image into the db I call addslashes() on the data, I was, accordingly, calling stripslashes() on the data after pulling the image back out of the database, but the image was getting mangled. I finally realized that the slashes were already stripped from my query results so stripping them again was removing legitimate slashes. The question is: why are the slashes already stripped out of the db results? I call set_magic_quotes_runtime(0) at the beginning of the scripts to turn off magic quoting. What else would cause this? Thanks for any suggestions. -Steve