`HEAD SHOP' MUSEUM TRACES DRUG USE, ABUSE

Paraphernalia, Mementos Among Exhibits

ARLINGTON, Va. - In a country where there's a hall of fame for everything
from bourbon to birth control, it had to happen: The United States opens its
first drug museum today.

First official museum anyway - it's run by the DEA, the 10,000-member Drug
Enforcement Agency that pursues drug offenders in 72 countries, including
Canada. (There's a three-agent bureau in Ottawa; another office is being
considered for Vancouver, to crack down on booming cross-border trafficking.)

Despite its law-and-order landlord, this government-run "head shop" has as
much paraphernalia and drug culture mementos as any of the old Yonge St. stores.

Not only are there '60s pipes for marijuana and hashish, but there are also
the pipes used by opium addicts in the 1800s and the pipes used by
crackheads in the 1990s.

Here are turn-of-the-century heroin spoons and syringes - available in the
1902 Sears Roebuck catalogue; smugglers' favoured transport objects, from a
lacy garter to a hollowed surfboard; and more varieties of rolling papers
than you'll find at a Metro convenience store.

There's a fur coat worn by a DEA agent who infiltrated the Chicago drug
underworld; and a Detroit agent's green platform shoes that give new meaning
to the word undercover.

There's also hardware from both sides of the street - a machine gun used by
DEA agents during the 1930s and a diamond-encrusted handgun seized from a
Costa Rican trafficker - and their business props. (The DEA agent gets an
encrypted cell phone; the grower has clothes peg devices to trip explosives
for those who stumble across his marijuana patch.)

While there are plenty of death statistics, photos of drug-overdosed
corpses, and a few anti-drug posters ("Death to all drug traffickers!" from
Malaysia), the museum doesn't slam visitors with an anti-drug message.

Instead, it starts with the China-Britain Opium War of 1840 (China feared
for addicts but the British feared loss of trade), to show the historical
pleasure-and-pain seesaw of once-legal drugs.

The museum has Godfrey's Cordial, an opium-laced spirit available from the
1780s until the 1950s; an 1898 medicine bottle from the Fredrich Bayer Co.,
the Aspirin manufacturer that added heroin to its over-the-counter cough
syrup; and, of course, the early colas of the 1900s whose cocaine
ingredients led to today's drug-free Coke label.

The label on Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup - sold as a teething remedy -
shows why the American Medical Association ran ads in 1906 connecting it to
numerous baby deaths.

It contained morphine.

"Some of the older people who have come in say they remember their
grandmothers used to give them a teaspoon of Mrs. Winslow's with a bit of
sugar to help it go down," says museum official Sean Fearns.

There are sketches of civil war soldiers hooked on morphine and "society
ladies" of the 1800s swooning over opiates, next to reminders that modern
writers and jazz musicians died from it.

Some of the Hollywood posters are as outrageous as the day they were
printed. An ad for a 1930s drug party flick seems ahead of its time: "Weird
orgies. Wild parties. Unleashed passions. Lust. Sorrow. Despair. Misery."

A poster at the museum entrance states that 4 million Americans admitted to
using drugs in 1960; in 1999 that number is 74 million.

It doesn't add the dollar signs announced this month by White House
anti-drug czar General Barry McCaffrey: Illegal drugs are a $57 billion
industry in America. Compare that with the $6 billion video game industry
and the $4 billion gun industry.