Pick Your Poison: Intoxicating Pleasures and Medical Prescriptions

Featuring over forty medicines, advertisements, historic and popular culture documents and books, video footage, and paraphernalia, the exhibition explores why some drugs remain socially acceptable, while others are outlawed because of their toxic, and intoxicating, characteristics.

These classifications have shifted at different times in history because of social and historical factors, and will continue to change. The exhibition explores some of the factors that have shaped the changing definition of some of our most potent drugs––alcohol, tobacco, opium, cocaine, and marijuana––from medical miracle to social menace.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website