December 31, 2003
20 Second Museum Review - DEA Museum
It's a little blurry, much like the late 1970s.
I wouldn't have been surprised if the Drug Enforcement Agency Museum was nothing more than a propagandistic house of horrors.
Well, it isn't -- entirely. Tucked in a corner of the DEA headquarters' lobby in Pentagon City (right across Hayes St. from the mall), there isn't really all that much to see. For hardened Washingtonians used to guiding visitors through labyrinthine Smithsonian museums, this looks like little more than a gussied-up hallway.
But it does have some pretty cool stuff. There are bottles of cocaine sold as baby remedies from the turn of the century, heroin sold as a cure for cocaine addiction and all manner of opium-smoking equipment. Later down the hallway are symbols of Scarface-era narcocrime, including a Paddington Bear stuffed with coke and a diamond-plated gun that evidently didn't do its drug-lord owner much good.
Of course, it wouldn't be a government-sponsored exhibit about drugs without a clumsy attempt at justifying its most notable waste - the War on Marijunana. There is nothing on pot until about the 1930s, when the narrative picks up, seemingly out of nowhere, somewhere in the middle of a panel about jazz musicians on heroin. Included are the perfunctory Reefer Madness posters and pulp fiction novels about how the demon weed turns women into violent whores. No mention, of course, about how none of that is true, but whatever. Also notably absent is a serious mention of alcohol prohibition, which would only serve sully the image the museum tries to build -- drugs are bad and the DEA uses cool technology and techniques to stop them.
To be fair, the propaganda is there, but it isn't oppressive. The museum does a pretty good job sticking to the evolution of drugs in America and the evolution of techniques to stop people from doing them.
A final note: Check out this page from the museum guestbook. If our friend from Seattle serious?
Posted by rj3 at December 31, 2003 11:25 AM
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