SPOILS FROM DRUG WAR ON DISPLAY IN DISPUTED DEA MUSEUM

The Drug Enforcement Agency Museum Highlights Law and Order, but
Critics Say Drug Policy Outcomes Are Distorted

ARLINGTON, VA. - Bongs, syringes and cocaine spoons line the
display's back wall. Across the aisle, next to yet more drug
paraphernalia, sits the replica crack house door.

You're not hallucinating: The Drug Enforcement Administration Museum
is a taxpayer-funded, government-run institution filled with
artifacts that could've been Cheech and Chong props.

Opened in 1999 on the ground floor of the DEA's offices in suburban
Washington, D.C., the one-room museum draws about 12,000 visitors
annually, director Sean Fearns says. Admission is free. Most visitors
are middle and high school students on class trips.

According to critics such as Allen St. Pierre, executive director of
the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, it's a
"terrific waste" of public money, a "boys with toys museum" that
glorifies the DEA and its agents at the expense of the truth.

The primary exhibit, "Illegal Drugs in America: A Modern History,"
describes the "rise of the modern drug culture" in the 1960s and "the
return of cocaine and the rise of the cartels" in the 1970s and 1980s.

Amid photos of despondent addicts and drug-addled celebrities, its
displays showcase DEA-seized paraphernalia including a trafficker's
diamond-encrusted Colt .45 and an eclectic array of guns, badges and
clothing used by DEA agents.

The museum's temporary exhibit, "DEA: Air, Land & Sea," features a
retired DEA helicopter, a confiscated Sea-Doo and a red race car
seized from an Austin-based trafficker.

All eye-catching; none, according to Fearns, as popular as the
biggest crowd-pleaser: a pair of green snakeskin shoes worn by an
undercover agent in Detroit in the 1970s.

"Quite frankly, folks would love to see us sell reproductions of
these in the gift shop," he says. (Yes, there is a gift shop. Stuffed
drug-sniffing DEA dogs go for $7.95.)

Fearns says students, parents and educators appreciate the museum and
the DEA's traveling exhibit, "Target America: Drug Traffickers,
Terrorists and You," which visited Dallas in 2003 and 2004 and has
drawn 150,000 to 350,000 visitors per year.

"Parents say to us, 'Thank you for allowing us to start the
conversation about drugs and drug abuse," he says.

But St. Pierre and other critics of U.S. drug policy argue that the
public shouldn't have to pay for a supposedly educational institution
that provides a "massively flawed" education.

The museum received $349,000 from Congress to open. At present, it
operates as a public-private partnership, getting at least $380,000
per year from the government.

St. Pierre says the museum fails to note the cost of the war on drugs
to taxpayers and ignores the nuances of drug policy. Caren Woodson,
director of government affairs for the advocacy group Americans for
Safe Access, says its displays boast of raids on violent cocaine
traffickers without mentioning raids on harmless medical marijuana users.

Fearns says the museum's space is limited. Tentative plans are in the
works for an exhibit on the history of marijuana use; drug policy "is
certainly an area we want to further look at."

With only one room at his disposal, it's impossible, Fearns says, to
do more than "scratch the surface" of the complex drug issue at any given time.

"Clearly," he says, "we'd need all 12 floors of this building to tell
a complete story."