GIVING VISITORS THE GOODS IN ALL THEIR GHOULISH GLORY

Quirky Collections Display Swag Confiscated From Drug Dealers And
Macabre Medical Mementoes

WASHINGTON, D.C.- I am gazing at a slick, maroon Bombardier Sea-Doo
on a pedestal labelled "evidence #48007" - part of a haul seized in a
raid on a Baltimore crack dealer.

The candy apple red drag racing car behind me was once owned by
notorious Mexican dealer Joe Fuentes. Nearby, there's a collection of
pistols that belonged to the Medellin cocaine cartel.

In a city of museums, this one, operated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA), has to be one of the quirkiest, with a
collection of 5,000 objects seized from drug dealers.

"This is like a head shop," jokes visitor Jonah Wexler, a former
Montrealer now a criminal investigator in Washington.

He is standing in front of a case full of bongs, papers, roach clips
and love beads illustrating the '60s drug culture.

Another exhibit features beautifully carved silver and ivory opium
pipes from the 19th century opium trade in New York City's Chinatown
and antique glass bottles that once contained patent medicines (the
secret ingredient of which was opium).

I wonder about the street value of the plastic bags of marijuana and
hallucinogenic mushroom "evidence" under glass.

"Not real," museum director Sean Fearns, tells me, sternly.

But thoroughly real are the 600 diamonds embedded in the handle of a
Colt pistol (owned by notorious Miguel Caro-Quintero, a Mexican
cocaine dealer), and the disturbingly graphic photos of shootouts,
including close-up images of the gruesome results of the 1993 gun
battle that took down the infamous Colombian drug dealer Pablo Escobar.

Wexler, here on a day off, is a criminal investigator and though not
unfamiliar with violence like that depicted in the photos, exhales sharply.

"They don't pull any punches at this museum, do they?"

Nor do they over at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, on
the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Hospital.

This museum was established during the U.S. Civil War as a collection
of objects relating to military medicine of the period. For Civil War
buffs, the collection (with 1 per cent of its 24 million objects on
display) is fascinating, if a bit gory.

Beautiful wooden boxes with their lids open (the doctor bags of the
period) are full of brass and wood medical instruments, which, if you
can divorce yourself from their uses (e.g., little saws for
battlefield amputations), are like beautifully crafted small
sculptures or artfully designed carpenters' tools.

Since the museum was established for medical research as well as to
preserve history, there are also bits of bone pierced by a variety of
projectiles.

The most-visited exhibit in the museum is the bullet that killed
President Abraham Lincoln. There are also fragments of his skull and
a bloodied sleeve of the surgeon who struggled to save Lincoln's life.

From dozens of rare microscopes and endless educational pathology
exhibits, we learn about lung disease (real blackened lungs on
display), arsenic poisoning (embalmed head and shoulders of a victim)
and bloodletting.

The exhibit of this old technique, now enjoying a resurgence of
popularity, includes not only brass cups and little lances, but also
live leeches lunching on bits of fresh liver.

I am squirming at the formaldehyde displays of the ravages of
elephantiasis and other tropical diseases, but for those with a
penchant for pathology, this museum is a mecca.

Discomfort aside, there is something profound about a visit to a
place that so explicitly documents the consequences of wars on its
participants. This is a museum that is likely to make conflict
resolution junkies out of the most hawkish.

You arrive and leave through the Walter Reed Army Hospital grounds
where rehabilitating young soldiers practise on their new prosthetics
(there is an exhibit of prosthetics in the museum from handcrafted
"peg legs" to today's high-tech Cheetah leg) or are wheeled around by
family members.

It certainly gives those graphic exhibits a sense of immediacy.