Welcome Back! After a two-year renovation, the all-new DEA Museum is now open… Admission is free, and there’s something for everyone...
— from the DEA Museum website
I’ve never been all that fond of museums, except maybe art museums. Seems like most of the objects in a typical museum are dead, and colorless, and covered in dust. Even educationally valuable exhibits can seem lifeless and unattractive.
Life isn’t dead and colorless and covered in dust, so why museums present the world that way, I really don’t understand.
Like, for example, one of the exhibits featured at the newly-renovated DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) Museum is this dead fish:
Apparently, at some point in the distant past, a drug smuggler got the bright idea of sewing a packet of heroin inside a recently-dead Koi fish, and tossed it into a shipment of live Koi destined for the U.S.
A shipment of live Koi would look something like this.
We can easily imagine that a drug-containing Koi, tossed into the shipment like this, might escape notice. Except the Koi in question was noticed, being dead and exhibiting some unusual stitches that you wouldn’t normally see on a Koi. As a result, some bad people were arrested.
A Koi is a beautiful fish, when alive. But once you make it into a museum exhibit, it loses all its color and ends up looking like… well, like a museum exhibit.
Another old, colorless item in the DEA Museum:
This item is so old, it’s older than the DEA itself, being the identification badge for a certain agent “Robert S. O’Brien” for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, predecessor of the DEA.
“The FBN operated under the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and its agents carried pocket credentials like Robert S. O’Brien’s issued in 1944. This official document includes an embossed photograph of O’Brien, his identification number, and the signature of Commissioner Harry Jacob Anslinger, who served in that position for 32 years. Its brown leather bifold protected O’Brien’s credentials from daily wear and the effects of time.”
The bifold may have protected agent O’Brien’s credentials from certain effects of time, but it didn’t keep it from becoming old and faded, and no longer valid.
I’ve never been to the DEA Museum, but upon reviewing the museum website, I was found myself worrying that the DEA itself might be dead and colorless and covered with dust.
Not a pleasant thing to consider.
One museum I really enjoyed, as a kid, was the ‘Exploratorium’ in San Francisco, when my family took a vacation to California. The exhibits were set up so that kids (and their parents) could participate in different types of science experiments in a ‘hands-on’ way. You didn’t just look in glass cases of dead things; you actually got to ‘operate’ the exhibits, and experience sounds, and shapes, and mathematics, and pretty much a whole universe of science stuff.
I still remember some of the exhibits, even 40 years later.
Museums don’t have to be boring.
If the DEA is not dead, maybe they could draw some inspiration from the ‘Exploratorium’. Like, there could be a ‘hands-on’ exhibit where we could learn how to hide cocaine in a suitcase with a false bottom. And another exhibit where we learn how to tap phone lines. Learning how to write up a proper search warrant, could be something kids and their parents would enjoy.
But I would draw the line at learning how to sew drugs into a dead fish. That would be going a bit too far.
I guess it was just a matter of time until drug enforcement was relegated to a museum. Marijuana is now legal (or at least de-criminalized) in about 33 states, and just about any doctor will write you a prescription for an opium derivative drug.
We’re going to have to make somethong else illegal, to keep the agents employed.
Maybe we could make guns illegal.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.