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.
Hellbound and Down 