WASHINGTON -- What's on display hints that this is no ordinary museum: Rolling papers, the kind used to smoke joints. Turn-of-the-century pill bottles labeled "Heroin." And a chrome-plated Harley Davidson, once the ride of a dope-trafficking biker gang in New England.
It is the federal government's newest stab at drug education.
Set to open next month in Arlington, Va., the Drug Enforcement Administration Museum explores America's drug culture and how segments of the population became addicted as early as the turn of the century -- before federal drug laws -- and why, after painful lessons were learned then, millions are obsessed with illegal drugs today.
At once, the museum documents the history of illegal drugs and the evolution of anti-drug policy and enforcement. The exhibits are disparate, taking visitors from the snakeskin platform shoes worn by undercover DEA agents schmoozing with the music-industry crowd in Detroit, to evidence bags full of real marijuana (in tightly secured display cases), to the gruesome photo of two high school-age traffickers too involved in Washington, D.C.'s drug war a decade ago, their hands duct-taped together and their heads shot through with bullets.
"The most basic history of this topic, people just don't know," says curator Jill Jonnes. "And it's not like other histories, where you say, 'Oh, it's so different now than then.' Drugs have pretty much the same effect on people they've always had."
Jonnes, 47, lives in Baltimore and wrote both a dissertation at Johns Hopkins University and a 1996 book, "Hep-Cats, Narcs and Pipe Dreams," about the history of drugs in America. A free-lance journalist, Jonnes fell upon the subject accidentally while writing stories about the South Bronx during her time as a journalism graduate student at Columbia University. She was hired by the museum two years ago, when funding for the $349,000 venture became available, bringing to life a dream that has percolated at the DEA since 1976.
The 2,200-square-foot museum is small, occupying converted office space on the first floor of DEA headquarters. But its goals are lofty: to convey to Americans that the use of illegal substances has been a problem in the nation for more than 100 years and to convince them that law enforcement, if given time and shown patience, can eradicate even overwhelming epidemics.
Frustrating many at the DEA is the notion that baby boomers discovered drugs and were first to experience their pleasures and pitfalls.
"Even my in-laws, who are in their 70s, had no idea there was a problem before the '60s and '70s," said James J. McGivney, a DEA agent for 28 years and now deputy director of D.A.R.E America, which educates schoolchildren about drugs.
"We've had a couple of drug epidemics and we successfully solved them," said McGivney, noting that by 1940, law enforcement had nearly wiped out one epidemic of drug addiction. "We think we can solve this one."
As of 1997, 14 million Americans were using illicit drugs regularly. The number has been nearly halved in the past two decades. Experts warn, however, that those numbers can mask the fact that there are more hard-core addicts today -- using substances such as cocaine and methamphetamine -- compared to 20 years ago.
A tough business
The museum's stunning photos and vivid written descriptions convey the tragedy drugs bring, for instance, the brutishness and wealth of the Latin American cartels. Visitors learn of how, in 1989, Colombia's Medellin cartel heard that two informants would be aboard an Avianca flight. So they blew up the plane. All 107 passengers and crew were killed.
They can view a model of "Casa Blanca," the Cali cartel's $18 million mansion that is modeled after the White House in Washington -- complete with look-alike portico.
Also in the museum are pictures of Cali's money-counters, machines that are kept quite busy: The DEA conservatively estimates Cali's annual profits to be around $8 billion.
"They got to the point where they couldn't count it -- they had to weigh it," remembers McGivney. Today, the cartel ships its cash in 25-pound boxes of $20 bills, he says, each containing about $1 million.
Another exhibit memorializes Enrique Camerena, a DEA agent who in 1985 was brutally murdered by members of a Mexican cartel. Camerena and his Mexican pilot were kidnapped in Guadalajara, interrogated and beaten to death. Their tortured bodies were discovered a month later on a remote ranch.
The DEA is keeping a tight lid on its museum, which the agency believes is the first of its kind, until the mid-May opening. But according to those intimately involved with the project, a walk through the museum is a venture through time, a chronological tour that hits the high and low points of America's unseemly marriage with drugs, which began when Chinese traders brought recreational opium smoking to the West Coast around 1850.
Felt better fast
Cocaine was introduced as a medical panacea in 1885; at the time it was the official cure of the American Hayfever Association. On display are folksy advertisements for cocaine toothache drops -- "For sale by all druggists" -- and for Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a shockingly effective cure for childhood teething that was full of morphine. Heroin emerged as an over-the-counter cough suppressant in 1898 and was sold by the Bayer company.
Scores became addicted to these amazing cure-alls. At the turn of the century, it is estimated that one in every 200 Americans was a drug addict. Most were genteel middle-class women.
Treatment centers began to open, but for the most part failed because the primary treatment was just to offer addicts more narcotics in lesser quantities.
The first federal drug law, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, for the first time placed restrictions on opium, heroin and cocaine, allowing their use only in specific medical cases and dramatically reducing the number of addicts nationwide. By 1940, said Jonnes, "drugs were considered ancient history."
They made a loud return in the '60s and '70s. The peak of drug use in America came in 1979, when middle-class professionals were buying, using and trafficking with cartels and 25 million Americans were regular users, according to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.
Display cases are packed with marijuana rolling papers from the period, even those bearing political campaign messages.
And there is a lime-green surfboard -- with brick-sized chunks of its inside ripped out -- used in the attempted smuggling of narcotics onto West Coast beaches in 1977.
Drug paraphernalia in this era was pervasive in homes, offices, even public streets. A photograph shows a vendor along Connecticut Avenue in downtown Washington, peddling pipes and roach clips. States began to outlaw such accessories around 1980.
But drugs, especially cocaine, were claiming too many victims, emptying the pocketbooks of many middle-class professionals and sending some into unemployment. When Maryland basketball star Len Bias died from cocaine use in 1986, on the eve of a lucrative NBA career, many skeptics began to accept the evils of drug-use.
So came a metamorphosis of the drug culture from one ebulliently embraced by the baby boomers to one destructive of America's poorer communities -- both rural towns and inner-cities -- where dealers found a nascent, more lucrative market.
In Baltimore, there were about 300 reported heroin addicts in 1950. In 1996, there were 39,000 -- one addict in every 17 residents.
"There's a nice line that everyone is equally vulnerable to drugs," Jonnes said. "It's really not true. Poor people are most vulnerable. And nobody's taking them to the Betty Ford clinic."
Agents of change
Organizers say they may change what is exhibited in the museum every few years to keep pace with the changing culture. The presentation of exhibits that opens in the space next month is called "Illegal Drugs in America: A Modern History."
Some exhibits open the window on the DEA, an agency renowned for its covertness.
DEA history is traced to 1915, when federal drug agents were actually part of the "Miscellaneous" wing of the Internal Revenue Service. (Their office was also responsible for regulating the commerce of oleo margarine and such.)
Over the years, undercover agents have labored to fit in with the milieus of the current drug culture. In the museum, for example, are the gangster-style "Tommy" sub-machine guns with the famed round magazines that agents toted in the 1920s.
So far, only DEA personnel and guests have been given tours. McGivney said many have been struck most by a memorial wall displaying photos of 68 DEA agents killed in action.
"I don't think people realize the day-to-day sacrifices these guys make," he said. "You don't know if you're going to come home."
The DEA Museum
The Drug Enforcement Administration Museum, which traces the history of drug use and policy, is expected to open in mid-May at 700 Army Navy Drive in Arlington, Va. The exact day has not been set yet.
Hours will be 10 a.m.-1 p.m. and 2-3: 30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday.
To visit, the public will have to reserve tickets for specific time slots. For information, call 202-307-3463. Admission will be free.