Thanks for the suggestions folks. No luck finding a solution; am thinking it may not be possible. Although this works:

use if (1 == 1), warnings => qw(all);
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am thinking that an eval on $debug *requires* the compiler, therefore compiler directives like "strict, warnings, diagnostics, etc." cannot be loaded in this manner (however, I'm often wrong). For more, see:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=323606