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IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
Touring the DEA's Dope Museum
by David C. Morrison

Taking a leak at the Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters in the high-rise Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., I am struck suddenly pee-shy. Tours of the hulkingly ugly F.B.I. headquarters downtown famously wind up with a light-heartedly sinister offer to collect the visitor's fingerprints. What's to keep the DEA from doing its own snooping?

As urine trickles into the bowels of the Drug War command post, I imagine my piss being sniffed by carefully calibrated gas chromatography devices. Should any illicit molecules be detected, armed lobby guards will storm the washroom: "Sir, slowly move your hands away from your penis...."

Never fear: Having gone for almost six years without imbibing any intoxicants, not even the legal ones, I am no longer a chemical criminal. No, I'm just visiting DEA headquarters, a normal civilian with two other ex-junkie friends,(no, that's not us in this picture) checking out the new DEA Museum and Visitors Center and its exhibit, "Illegal Drugs in America: A Modern History."

An exhibit on the dope culture stocked with artifacts donated by

the Association of Former Federal Narcotics Agents might well be expected to take the same sort of even-handed approach to its subject as, say, a Nazi-run Museum of Jewish Culture.
Disappointingly, the DEA Museum fails to rise fully to the laughable extremes to which American anti-dope agitprop so often aspires. Not too much out-and-out Reefer Madness buffoonery on display here.

On the other hand, this dope never doubts the proposition that certain plants and chemicals have been banned and their users branded as criminals simply because these are very, very Bad Drugs.
continue... One is hard-pressed


	*November 2001*