“The fiction that permeates the museum is that DEA is somehow winning a drug war that is justified.”
By Helen Redmond, Filter
Why would anyone visit the DEA Museum? My excuse was to see all the lies and misinformation in one place. And I wanted to understand how the curators sold and sanitized the war on drugs. I was not disappointed.
On the museum website, I got a preview of how brazen it would be. An online exhibition about Harry Anslinger is called, “A Life of Service.” For three decades, Anslinger was the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It would be hard to overstate the destructive influence the diehard prohibitionist had on national and international drug policy. He was the father of the drug war.
The exhibition introduces him as a son of immigrants who made good in America. Then we learn about his fight to stop drug use and trafficking through the Roaring ‘20s, 1940s Hollywood and the Cold War. Anslinger unleashed his agents against bootleggers, cannabis smokers, cocaine sniffers, heroin injectors and even trainers who “doped” their horses. He’s described as a fiscally responsible, no-nonsense boss who just wanted a safe, drug-free world.
In truth, Anslinger was a racist monster responsible for incalculable suffering, deaths and imprisonment. His legacy is one of targeting Black and Brown communities for draconian prison sentences over unjust drug laws. Anslinger had a perverse hatred for jazz music, and harassed the great jazz vocalist Billie Holiday to her death.
His bald-faced falsehoods are legendary. “Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death,” he once said. Of course, none of this made it into the exhibition.
The DEA Museum is in Arlington, Virginia, on Army Navy Drive. The location is odd; it’s at the end of a desolate pedestrian walkway on the first floor of a nondescript federal building.
Visitors are greeted by guards and a security checkpoint. I put my bag and coat through the metal detector and showed ID—a perfect way to enter a museum that celebrates drug enforcement.
The first thing you see in the lobby is a wall of photos titled, “Faces of Fentanyl.” A placard states, “In memory of the many lives lost to fentanyl overdose. Each face represents lost promise, a life of possibilities cut short.”
It’s overwhelming and emotionally slaying to look at the faces of hundreds of people who’ve died. The context is also enraging, because they died due to prohibition. The goal of this display is to direct anger toward anyone except the DEA and other law enforcement agencies responsible for these preventable deaths.
For some weird reason, the DEA drug warriors think they are well placed to educate the public about drugs. A series of pastel-colored kiosks feature photos and information about popular substances. The most egregious is the opioid kiosk. A section describes three waves of the overdose crisis—respectively involving prescription opioids, heroin and fentanyl.
This is the Iron Law of Prohibition in action: the harder the enforcement, the “harder” the drugs. DEA played a central role in escalating the overdose crisis. It spearheaded a crackdown on pharmaceutical opioids that led to the spread of more potent unregulated drugs and far higher death rates. Under DEA-enforced prohibition, there have been over 1 million overdose deaths since 1999, including 110,000 in 2022 alone.
Erasing the agency’s real role, the exhibit claims: “The DEA is working to curtail the drug crisis through regulation. This includes emergency scheduling of all illicit fentanyl-related substances.”
So more prohibition is the answer? It would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so catastrophic. Synthetic opioids remain cheap and plentiful across the U.S., as the exhibit fails to mention.
Next I picked up a pamphlet titled, “Preventing Marijuana Use Among Youth & Young Adults.” It’s an embarrassment of Reefer Madness misinformation.
Blaming long-term marijuana use for mental illness and problems at school, while providing no evidence, the pamphlet asserts that “marijuana and cannabis are words that are used interchangeably but they don’t mean exactly the same thing.” What?
A section on medical marijuana doubts that the drug has any therapeutic properties, claiming that it’s “still an open question that science has not resolved.” But then the pamphlet states that CBD “may be useful in reducing pain and inflammation and controlling epileptic seizures.” So which is it?
Heightening the absurdity is a display on the Controlled Substances Act, the federal law which places all such substances into five categories. Drugs are scheduled based on whether they’re deemed to have medical use or “abuse” potential.
Cannabis is in Schedule I—the category for drugs considered to have no accepted medical use and high potential for “abuse.” This is categorically untrue. Ask the millions of people who use the drug to treat nausea, spasms, migraines, insomnia, anxiety and a host of other maladies, or do a quick search in PubMed. Other drugs in Schedule I include LSD and MDMA, both of which have demonstrated therapeutic potential.
That DEA gets it so wrong speaks volumes about its incompetence in deciding which substances can be prescribed. They’re not doctors, they’re drug warriors!
Do you want to be a junior special agent? You can earn a DEA badge if you complete a workbook with a crossword puzzle about the history, jobs and work of DEA. And you get to color pictures of DEA agents at work, including one holding the hand of a little boy and handcuffing a man who is on his knees. Fun times!
Or have those kiddos sign the “Drug Free Pledge,” where they promise to stay in school, make the world a better place to grow up in, keep dreams alive and live drug-free lives. Good luck doing all that in Trump’s America.
There’s more fun for the kids. In “Stories from the Collection,” the museum showcases Special Agent Barbie and Ken figures who work in the Los Angeles Field Division. They were given to the DEA by an executive from Mattel Toys. Inside the box, the two smiling dolls sport cool black sunglasses and are surrounded by guns, bags of pills and stacks of money. The package proclaims, “Ready for Action!!!”
These cringeworthy attempts to indoctrinate children into the ideology of prohibition are reminiscent of the debunked DARE program. The drug warriors are no more qualified as teachers than as doctors.
“There are consequences every time a person uses drugs” is the title of an interactive exhibit, designed like a pinball machine. Instead of launching a metal ball, you drop in a red “illicit drug chip.” It bounces off bumpers and lands in one of four bins marked: Economic, Environmental, Personal and Societal. The message is that individuals who use drugs are to blame for negative impacts on relationships, communities and the environment.
Actually, the system of prohibition is responsible. If the drug war ended and all substances were legalized and regulated, the vast majority of harms would be eliminated—like, say, the aerial spraying of coca crops that has been condemned by human rights and environmental activists because of its toxic effects on people, land and water. The familiar goal of this exhibit is to shift blame away from the DEA, which conducts anti-drug operations in 69 countries.
Museum curators want visitors to know that DEA is a great place to work. Just don’t look at the Wall of Honor, which features dozens of portraits of DEA agents killed in the futile pursuit of a drug-free world. You can be a special agent, diversion investigator, intelligence research specialist or forensic examiner. Dozens of video interviews of retired employees attest to how much they loved their job.
An exhibit asserts that DEA values gender diversity and that women are promoted to leadership positions. There are photos of three women who “broke the mold.” Karen Tandy was the first woman to head DEA. During her four-year tenure, she led the charge to “wipe out most of the nation’s illegal methamphetamine labs” and extradited “drug lords from major cartels” to the U.S.
Neither effort had any impact on the availability of drugs. The so-called kingpin strategy of arresting trafficking leaders sets off a murderous jockeying for power and leads to more violence. The exhibit attempts to normalize working for a violent, racist and colonial police agency.
The most interesting part of the museum is the memorabilia. A yellowish special tax-stamp certificate was issued in 1923 by the Internal Revenue Service to a “practitioner dispensing opium, etc.” It cost $3. Wow!
A little-known fact is that there used to be drug “maintenance clinics” in the U.S. The Supreme Court outlawed them, and almost all were shut down by the end of the 1920s. The “McCracken Smooth Arch Narcotic Prescription File” is a small, red steel box where pharmacists stored the records of dispensed opioids. Times have changed. Now that information is stored digitally via Big Brother prescription drug monitoring programs.
Some things are still analog. On a dated, bright-red landline phone, you can pick up the handset and listen to tips called into the drug diversion office. The display explains that “DEA follows up on tips to investigate those who sell medicines to the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”
The most important DEA history, concerning its racism, violence and corruption, is entirely absent from the museum. Where are the exhibits explaining the well documented racist roots of drug prohibition and how communities of color have been disproportionately targeted by the drug war, fueling mass incarceration of Black, Brown and poor people?
There were no photos or videos featuring Daniel Chong, a 23-year-old man who was forgotten in a DEA holding cell, with no food, water or toilet, for five days. In 2012, a handcuffed Chong drank his own urine to survive and with a shard of glass carved “Sorry Mom” onto his arm as a way to say goodbye. He lost 15 pounds and suffered severe PTSD. And for what? Chong, who was arrested in a raid on a home in San Diego, was never charged. The DEA agents responsible didn’t even lose their jobs.
I looked in vain for the exhibition explaining how DEA agents in Colombia partied with sex workers paid by drug-trafficking organizations. And where was the interactive display about José Ismael Irizarry? The former DEA agent admitted laundering money for Colombian trafficking groups and skimming millions from seizures and informants. Neither could I find a pamphlet to clarify how DEA agent Nathan Koen took bribes from a trafficker.
The fiction that permeates the museum is that the DEA is somehow winning a drug war that is justified. There’s a proudly displayed tagline: “DEA: Tough Job, Vital Mission.”
Not everyone is buying it. One exhibit accidentally poses a valid question: “How will I be an agent of change?”
On a stack of cards, visitors are asked to “Share your thoughts” on drug-related questions. Rows of cards were on display with written responses, and they were fascinating to read.
The answer to one question—”What will you do to help an adult in your life who is dealing with drug misuse?”—was right on target. “Make sure they are informed of safe injection sites, promote socially funded mental health supports,” it read.
A reply to another question—”How can you help educate your fellow students on the dangers of drug misuse?”—was also spot on: “Teach them about harm reduction and advocate for policy change.”
I decided not to fill out a card. If I had, I would have scribbled three words: Abolish the DEA!
This article was originally published by Filter, an online magazine covering drug use, drug policy and human rights through a harm reduction lens. Follow Filter on Facebook or Twitter, or sign up for its newsletter.
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