DEA OPENS ITS MUSEUM ON DRUG ABUSE

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government's newest museum displays hash pipes,
hookahs, bongs, American-flag rolling papers and several bags of marijuana.
It also has grubby old syringes, bent spoons, a pill bottle labeled
"heroin," and a grisly photo of a junkie killed by an overdose. Plus a
diorama titled "An American Head Shop, Circa 1970s."

It is a museum about dope. And why not? America has museums devoted to just
about everything -- the Jesse James Museum, the Liberace Museum, the Kansas
Barbed Wire Museum, the Museum of Whiskey History, the Hot Dog Hall of Fame.
So it was probably inevitable that somebody would create a museum devoted to
two of America's multibillion-dollar obsessions -- getting wasted and trying
to stop people from getting wasted.

It is called the Drug Enforcement Administration Museum and Visitors Center
and it opened Monday at the DEA headquarters in Arlington, Va.

A modest exhibit, it fills a long, narrow 2,200-square-foot room containing
scores of photos and a fair amount of drugs. It set the DEA back $350,000
(in "appropriated funds," not a stack of hundreds stashed in a dealer's sock
drawer). The permanent exhibit, "Illegal Drugs in America: A Modern
History," is a delightfully graphic reminder that America's intense
love-hate relationship with intoxication goes back further than we realize.

"By 1900, when one in 200 Americans was addicted," reads one wall panel,
"the typical addict was a white middle-class female hooked through medical
treatment."

That was "the golden age of patent medicines" -- unregulated elixirs that
promised cures for just about everything and that frequently contained
"whopping doses of opiates or cocaine."

The exhibit is a 150-year chronological tour that proves drug abuse to be as
American as, well, alcohol abuse. As far back as the Civil War, high-powered
opiates were routinely used as home remedies. One display quotes Mary
Chesnut, the famous Confederate diarist, writing about her casual use of
narcotics for the relief wartime woes: "I relieved the tedium by taking
laudanum."

It was the Civil War, not Vietnam, that produced the first addicted
veterans -- so many wounded soldiers got hooked on morphine that addiction
was nicknamed "the soldier's disease" or "Army disease."

By the turn of the century, Americans were guzzling all sorts of magical
cure-alls. The museum displays bottles of Godfrey's Cordial, Grove's Baby
Bowel Formula and Greene's Syrup of Tar -- all of which contained opium.
There is also an advertisement for a teething remedy called Mrs. Winslow's
Soothing Syrup, which shows two happy little tots snuggling in bed with Mom.
It is a homey scene and you'd never guess that what's soothing these kids is
a dollop of morphine. Displayed nearby is a 1906 coroner's report from
Mankato, Minn., revealing that a 19-month-old girl named Mary Veigel died of
"poisoning from soothing syrups."

The American genius for hype is evident in the advertisements for these
potions. An advertisement for Cocaine Toothache Drops shows two cute little
tykes crossing a bucolic stream. The slogan: "Instantaneous Cure!" An ad for
Coca-Cola, which actually contained cocaine until 1903, promised that it
would "ease the tired brain, soothe the rattled nerves and restore wasted
energy to both Mind and Body."

Meanwhile, Bayer was touting its new product -- "Heroin" -- as "highly
effective against coughs," and Parke-Davis promised that its cocaine remedy
would "make the coward brave, the silent eloquent (and) free victims of
alcohol and opium habits from their bondage." The company did not reveal
that cocaine itself was highly addictive.

In addition to teaching visitors about the history of drug abuse, the museum
is also designed, says curator Jill Jonnes, to chronicle the history of the
DEA and its predecessors.

In 1906, the government began regulating drugs and in 1930 it established
the Bureau of Narcotics, the bureaucratic grandfather of the DEA. "Every
narcotics agent was issued a badge, a Thompson submachine gun and a pair of
hand grenades," reads the sign beside a case displaying, yes, a Tommy gun, a
couple of grenades and a slew of badges. Apparently, the grenade-toting
agents were successful: "By World War II, American addicts were a
diminishing cohort of aging white males."

By then, though, the Bureau had found a new target -- young black males who
played jazz and smoked marijuana, which was banned by federal law in 1937.
"Jazz rebels in revolt against `square' America took up marijuana as part of
their stance as `hepsters,' " reads the introduction to a series of photos
of jazz hepsters, including Red Rodney, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker --
all of whom later became heroin addicts. Not pictured is Louis Armstrong,
who, according to his biographers, avidly smoked pot for 40 years while
assiduously avoiding anything stronger.

"Marihuana -- Weed With Roots in Hell," reads a poster for a 1930s anti-pot
movie that features "Weird Orgies, Wild Parties, Unleashed Passions."
Perhaps the producer should have hired one of those hepsters as a
consultant. The poster shows a man sticking a syringe into a woman's arm. Of
course, as everyone knows, marijuana is not injected. It is actually
dissolved in maple syrup and poured on flapjacks.

Jazz musicians are not the only artists attacked in the exhibit for
advocating drugs. So are "Beat literary types." Their photos identify them:
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs. "Popular culture glorified
the benefits of drugs while ignoring the tragedy and despair they caused,"
the wall says. Nearby is a quote from Burroughs on his junkie days: "I had
not taken a bath in a year or changed my clothes or removed them except to
stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal
addiction."

That seems like an odd form of glorification. But the exhibit is too
heavy-handed to acknowledge any such distinctions.

Baby boomers may experience some nostalgia -- and quite a bit of
embarrassment -- when viewing a display titled "The Rise of the Modern Drug
Culture: 1960s to 1970s." There are chocolate-flavored rolling papers, a
hideously garish psychedelic poster of Jimi Hendrix and a water pipe made
out of a Kraft Imitation Mayonnaise jar and four rubber tubes.

Worst of all: a pair of mint-green snakeskin shoes with platform soles 2
inches high. It was used by a DEA agent who infiltrated the Detroit music
scene in the '70s and is quoted as saying: "I paid $150 for these shoes and
I'd wear them with my bell-bottoms and this wild rayon shirt."

The green shoes, the bell-bottoms and the wild rayon shirt seemingly make up
an unholy trinity that should permanently refute the theory that drugs
enhance the aesthetic senses.

As the museum reveals, drugs have a way of spawning theories that later
prove embarrassingly naive. In 1975, the White House -- the Ford White
House -- issued a drug report theorizing that cocaine "usually does not
result in serious social consequences, such as crime, hospital emergency
rooms admissions or death."

A decade later, the crack cocaine epidemic resulted in very serious social
consequences, including unprecedented levels of crime, emergency rooms
filled with overdoses and gunshot cases, and many, many deaths.

The display that covers that era features pictures of the bloody corpses of
various cocaine dealers -- including Pablo Escobar, the Colombian cartel
jefe, or boss -- who have been gunned down. There is also a lime-green
surfboard that was hollowed out and filled with dope by smugglers. And a
beautiful red Harley-Davidson confiscated from a dope-dealing Hell's Angel.
Not to mention a lot of powerful guns, including a diamond-studded Colt .45
seized from a Colombian dealer.

The exhibit ends on a surprisingly pessimistic note: "Today, America
confronts large and powerful drug syndicates headquartered in Colombia and
Mexico, worldwide criminal organizations far more ruthless, corrupting and
sophisticated that anything seen heretofore in this country."

That is not the kind of upbeat conclusion likely to send visitors rushing to
the gift shop to pay $20 for a DEA sweat shirt or $65 for a "DEA 25th
Anniversary Badge in Lucite." But it is no doubt appropriate for a museum
depicting a war that has not yet been -- and may never be -- won.

As long as some people crave chemical oblivion and others are willing to
sell them the chemicals, the DEA is likely to remain very busy.

Fortunately, the museum's designers have left space for future expansion.
They may need it.