DRUG MUSEUM'S SHINING EXAMPLE OF DECADENCE

By Hugo Gurdon in Pentagon City

THE most telling exhibits in America's newest museum are burnt and bent
teaspoons, stained rags, used soda bottles and a diamond-encrusted Colt 45.

They expose the sordid, deadly reality and phoney glamour of their subject,
which is drugs. Gathered in glass display cases are the paraphernalia of
America's century-long battle for and against the right to "get high" -
bongs, psychedelic posters, liquorice rolling papers, Tommy guns and grenades.

The Drug Enforcement Administration museum, which opened its doors to the
public on Tuesday, lays bare the wilful self-delusion of the 1960s and
1970s, when Baby Boomers swept aside a mass of historical evidence and
argued that drugs were intrinsic to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, rather than the low road to ruin. One of the exhibits is a 1937
poster, captioned The Devil's Roost, in which the vultures of "vice",
"want", "insanity", "misery" and "crime" perch on a reaper-like figure
marked "Dope". A few feet away is a 1908 New York Times front page taken up
with a story under the headline "The growing menace of the use of cocaine".

Dominating one wall is a black and white picture of the actress Dorothy
Davenport, "shooting up" with a syringe in the 1923 film Human Wreckage.
More than 100 feature films were made in the silent era focusing on the
perils of drugs.

In 1900, one in every 200 Americans was a drug addict. Many of them swigged
laudanum. By the Second World War, though, drug addiction was a marginal,
statistically negligible vice in America. Decades of evidence, and policing
by federal agents armed with a Tommy gun and two grenades each as standard
issue, had worked.

Then came the Sixties and gurus such as Allen Ginsberg, demonstrating in
New York with a poster bearing the legend "Pot is a reality kick". The drug
culture was born again. Traditional drug stores, oddly-titled corner shops
that sold everything from ice-cream to toothpaste, gave way to "head shops"
that sold drug paraphernalia such as hookahs and roach clips - tweezers to
hold a joint when it was too small and hot for bare fingers.

Redolent of the drug culture's seediness are the opium-stained rags, pipes
made from old 7-Up bottles and elasticated arm-bands to make a junkie's
veins bulge to make injections easier. So, too, are the photographs of
dealers shot dead, and addicts in the final contortions of a fatal overdose.

Perhaps the most telling artifact in the museum is the gleaming, silver
Colt 45 handgun, with the diamond-studded grip. It was owned by Rafael
Caro-Quintero, a Mexican drug dealer. It is the quintessence of the phoney
heroism and deceptive glitter at the heart of the drug culture.

Caro-Quintero glares out from a photograph nearby, disheveled and dressed
in nothing but dirty jeans at the time of his arrest. He murdered a DEA
agent and is now behind bars.