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DEA's new museum
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 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 multi-billion-dollar obsessions -- getting wasted and trying to stop people from getting wasted.
It's called the Drug Enforcement Administration Museum and Visitors Center and it can be found at the DEA headquarters in Pentagon City. 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 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. There's also an ad for a teething remedy called Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, which shows two happy little tots snuggling in bed with Mom. It's 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 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," and Parke-Davis promised that its cocaine remedy would "make the coward brave, the silent eloquent [and] free victims of alcohol and opium habits
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