DEA MUSEUM EXHIBITS 15 DECADES OF LOVE, HATE FOR DRUGS

WASHINGTON - The United States 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's called the Drug Enforcement Administration Museum and Visitors Center
and it opens today 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.

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 most people 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 of 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.

The American genius for hype is evident in the advertisements for these
potions. An ad 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"

History of DEA

In addition to teaching visitors about the history of drug abuse, the museum
is also designed, curator Jill Jonnes says, 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 narcs 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.

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.

Rise of `modern drug culture'

Baby boomers of a certain age 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 mayonnaise jar and four rubber tubes.

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 corpses of various
coke dealers - including Pablo Escobar, the Colombian cartel "jefe" - who
had been gunned down. There's 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 DEA Museum is located at 700 Army-Navy Drive, Arlington, Va., (across
from the Pentagon City Metro stop). It is open free of charge on weekdays by
appointment only.