The Drug Culture Gets a Museum

By Andrew Ferguson/Arlington, Va.

Peering into a museum display case in Arlington, Va., Elizabeth James, 15, looks in wonderment at the artifacts spread out before her. The display re-creates the window of a "head shop" from the 1970s. What catches her attention isn't the array of marijuana pipes, rolling papers and bongs; like most American high schoolers nowadays, she's a veteran of drug-education classes from fifth grade onward and has seen it all before, in movies and in classroom programs. No, what interests her are the psychedelic posters pinned to the wall, great swirling designs in Day-Glo colors proclaiming PEACE and LOVE and the other phantasms of a bygone era. "These are kind of cool," she says. "Were they for decoration? Like, on your wall?"

Ah, youth! Yes, my child, once upon a time...

So it goes, at least part of the time, at the Drug Enforcement Administration Museum, a long sliver of a room tucked off the lobby of the DEA's headquarters, just across the Potomac from Washington. In a metropolitan area swarming with museums, this one is unique. Having opened only last May, it's too young to have earned a must-see designation on capital tours, and with an exhibit space of only 2,200 sq. ft., it's a dwarf among the Smithsonian titans. Its theme--"Illegal Drugs in America: A Modern History"--isn't the ordinary stuff of sightseer oohing and aahing. But it's a strangely compelling place nonetheless, fast gaining popularity among area schools and youth groups. The museum is part propaganda, part history lesson and--for baby boomers of a certain age and tendency--part stroll down memory lane.

Displays at the museum begin with the Opium Wars of the 19th century and extend to the bloody confrontations with Colombian cocaine cartels in our day. Elizabeth and 15 of her classmates from Arlington's Washington-Lee High School followed this narrative arc with the help of Fred Smith, who, like most of the museum's docents, is a retired DEA special agent.

Smith was happy to regale the kids with tales of exotic stakeouts and drug busts. (He spent much of his career in France and North Africa.) And he took special pleasure in pointing out the collection's more unusual artifacts: the Superfly fur coat and alligator-skin platform shoes donned by an agent for a 1970s undercover sting; an unlucky drug lord's diamond-handled revolver; a hollowed-out, lime-green surfboard used to smuggle drugs off the coast of Florida. And there's much more.

For baby boomers, the museum freezes under glass that deceptively innocent era, roughly from the late '60s to the late '70s, when the phrase recreational drugs had not yet become a tragicomic oxymoron. In addition to the paraphernalia collection--which resembles nothing so much as a college dorm room circa 1975--there are photos of such icons of the day as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Timothy Leary (twice!), as well as the shorter-lived Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

There's even a poster for Reefer Madness, the earnestly lunatic, 1930s antimarijuana film that was revived in the irony-drenched '60s and '70s. "We wanted to show how hokey [the movie] was," says Sean Fearns, of the DEA public-affairs section. "It was so naive to think that this kind of thing would keep kids off drugs."

Needless to say, the exhibit is otherwise irony-free, the DEA not being known as the wackiest of the federal law-enforcement agencies. The tour ends in a mini-theater that plays those particularly gruesome antidrug TV ads that we're used to seeing these days, with troops of hollow-eyed addicts testifying to the dark side of drugs. It forms quite a contrast with the psychedelic posters and love beads in the head-shop window. And it's effective too, at least according to most of the kids on a recent visit. "You have to get their interest before you can give them information," said Brenda Harris, who brought the kids from her class on health and physical education. "And I think this place has definitely got their attention."