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Nearly a generation before, narcotics commissioner Harry J. Anslinger had virtually eradicated drug abuse, the exhibit tells us, when he stonewalled overseas smuggling. By the end of World War II, there were just 50,000 addicts in the country.

But we later discover that outright victory in the war on drugs was as elusive as a first high. The exhibit is unflinching in chronicling the hold that narcotics have had on our lives since the Chinese brought opium to the Gold Rush and Western railroads.

An 1892 photo shows middle-class white housewives sprawled out in a San Francisco opium den, 17 years after the city -- yes, San Francisco -- passed the nation's first drug law prohibiting the smoking of opium.

Then the timeline focuses on cocaine. The pharmaceutical firm Parke-Davis advertised that cocaine "makes the coward brave, the silent eloquent." Two children jump from rock to rock in a stream for an ad touting cocaine tooth drops. So-called cures for addiction are shown to include more of the drugs themselves.

In assessing cocaine, even the good doctor Freud was wrong in the final analysis. "One feels self-reliant, vigorous and active," he wrote. "It is absolutely harmless in long use."

The literary world has its say here, too. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes told a disapproving Dr. Watson that he used cocaine because he needed the stimulation until a more exciting case came along.

Hollywood druggie movies, as the collection of lurid movie posters attests, flourished at the peak of the first heroin and cocaine epidemics but nearly vanished for more than 10 years because of the nation's preoccupation with World War II and Anslinger's get-tough policies.

Movies such as 1955's "The Man With the Golden Arm" with Frank Sinatra and 1957's "Pickup Alley" with Victor Mature reappeared during the Cold War when French Corsican (the French connection) gangsters began monopolizing the heroin trade, and prominent jazz and beat figures such as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and William Burroughs lent the drug an underground cachet.

"I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours," Burroughs wrote of his heroin bingeing in Morocco, a passage of which is displayed. "I was only roused to action when the hourglass/junk ran out."

The DEA text is easy to read and isn't afraid to offer a theory or two. The exhibit speculates that Len Bias' cocaine-induced heart failure after being drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1986 ended the upper class' love affair with coke, eventually forcing dealers to go down-market into crack.

"Illegal Drugs" winds its way through heroin chic to current developments like methamphetamines and heroin so pure it can be ingested in pill form.

There is plenty of space for the next wave.
salon.com | Sept. 28, 1999

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