For the lowdown on getting high, visit the DEA Museum

This is the seventh in a series of weekly guides to museums you might not have discovered.

Beyond the DARE program, cheesy after-school specials, and Nancy Reagan imploring the masses to “Just Say No,” some of us grow up learning very little about the breadth and depth of global drug abuse. Illegal drug use dates as far back as the Opium Wars of the early 1800s, and the Drug Enforcement Administration Museum in Arlington uses those conflicts as a jumping off point to explore drug abuse in the United States. Documenting 150 years of illegal drug use in America, the DEA museum covers the history of drug use and the science of how drugs affect the human body.

Show me what you’re made of You probably know that until 1904, a bottle of Coca-Cola contained cocaine. But Coke wasn’t the only product laced with a lethal substance. In 1888, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Cough Syrup, marketed for children, was opiate-based. Babies died when parents accidentally overdosed their children. Dangerous drugs were so commonplace that in 1902 you could order a hypodermic syringe kit from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, complete with an opiate-based drug as a sample. Bayer advertised aspirin and heroin side by side in 1900.

The high-water mark Illegal drug use peaked in America in 1979. One in nine Americans used drugs “regularly,” which was defined as at least once a month.

More money, more problems The first hard-core drug addicts in America were middle-class white women, who had access to doctors and the means to acquire patent medicine. Later, powder cocaine became a problem among wealthy white men who used the drug as a status symbol. The trend was such an open secret that Time magazine’s July 6, 1981, cover showed a big martini glass filled with cocaine, topped with a straw and an olive. The headline: “High on Cocaine: A drug with status — and menace.”

Suiting up The DEA wasn’t established officially until 1973. Narcotic agents in 1915 were issued a badge, a Thompson submachine gun and a pair of hand grenades. There were only 100 agents for the entire country.

All that glitters Rafael Caro Quintero, now in prison for his part in the murder of DEA agent Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena in 1985, bought a Colt .45 with a pearl handle and had the pearl swapped out for diamonds. His gold-and-diamond-trimmed gun is on display at the museum, alongside an exhibit about drug cartels in Mexico.

UrbanPeek.com » The Evolution of a Bottle

A glass at soda fountains, which were popular in the United States at the time due to the belief that carbonated water was good for the health, the bottled product came later.  The taste was always the same but not the bottling, which kept developing as time passed . This is a brief look on the evolution of the Coca Cola bottle design.

The 1899: The original Coca-Cola bottle didn’t have anything in common with the one we are used to, it’s design was more square with embossed glass.

The Root Glass Company in 1915 gave the coke bottle its famous look. The bottle designer, Earl R. Dean found his inspiration in the cocoa pod and replicated it into the coca cola’s bottle. The decision to mold was approved within 24 hours since the design was made and in November 1915 bottle got the patent. The original design never made it to life because of a little mistake: its mid-height diameter was fairly larger  than its base making it an unstable product.

Ummm, how were Cola-cola treating their workers, local villagers whose wells ran dry because of local factories, and trade-union leaders killed in South America whilst the bottle ‘evolved’? Yep, i like a bit of something fizzy after some greasy chicken, but i’m not going to pretend its somethiing its not. 125 years of Coke, and what a bloody mess they’ve made.

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