Being surrounded by glass boxes of hard-core drugs placed an unreasonable burden on the collective cool of a group of French teenagers.

It's one thing knowing all the words to No wooman, no cry - quite another to come face to face with a museum cabinet brimming with bongs, Rizla rips and organic matter.

The Parisian school party fairly buzzed through the Museum of London's Drugs: What should London Do? exhibition. Pubescent Gallic glum gave way to gleeful "Wiz zees narcotics, monsieur, you are spoiling us" gestures.

Drugs controversy: All huff and puff?

It was all there - from pictures of high-flying city types injecting heroin, to snapshots of a not-too-long-gone era when cocaine cough sweets were all the rage.

Also featured prominently were samples of the drugs themselves, safely shut away in glass display cabinets.

The exhibition tells the tale of substance discovery, synthesis and use.

The law-enforcers of today may well place tough restrictions on drug use, but the exhibition tells how as recently as WWII, 72 million amphetamine tablets were prescribed to troops.

And while at the turn of the century, cannabis was prescribed for all manner of aches and pains, heroin - first synthesised from opium in 1890 - was being hailed as the new wonder drug.

At the same time, cocaine was being used as a cure for hay fever, cancer and nymphomania.

An article from the British Medical Journal of 1902, quoted in one display, describes the rising popularity of Ladies' Morphine Tea Parties, where the hostess would oblige her guests with a quick injection of something stronger than caffeine.

And The Times ran an article in 1918 describing how soldiers would in future require a prescription to obtain coca, cocaine, codeine, diamorphine, Indian hemp, opium or morphine.

Another document from way back in 1800, charted how a Thomas Jones was awarded £50 by the Society of Arts for "proving the viability of commercial cultivation of opium in Enfield".

Curator Annette Day explained that the introduction of most drugs into society is initially due to their medicinal properties.

From medical to recreation use

"However, for example in the case of opium and cocaine, it became clear in the course of time that they were addictive, and not really very good for you in the long-term," she said.

That, and the associations between certain drugs and the social groups which used them gradually led to their outlawing.

Ms Day says: "At the turn of the century, opium was associated with the Chinese community in London's Limehouse district.

"It was smoked fairly openly in opium dens, which to the upright majority of the time were scandalous places where Chinese men seduced white women."

So opium was gradually banned while the consumption of tobacco and alcohol - associated with a better class of user - continued. And of course, booze and fags continue to rake in oodles of cash in taxes.

Es in all shapes and sizes

Exhibits on contemporary drug use include a variety of cannabis seeds, debate on its legalisation, and all the bits and bobs people use to smoke it.

Ecstasy features prominently, as does the dance culture which spawned its mass use.

Heroin, cocaine and LSD all get a show - in their medical and recreational states.

Even magic mushrooms, poppers, wild lettuce and khat get a look in.

Ms Day said that the purpose of the display is not to moralise, but to provide social and historical documentation of drug use - and spark honest debate on the issue.

"We want people to go away from here questioning what a drug is, and what should be done about their use.

"We want them to look at the examples of how the issue is treated in other cultures, and to think about how it might be treated in the future, and about how drug culture evolves.

"We have attracted some criticism because we are exhibiting things like home-made bongs - an apparatus for inhaling cannabis smoke," she said.

"There are some people who interpret that as us actually demonstrating how to make one.

"But what we say to that is if people want to take drugs in any form, they will find out how, whether we exhibit paraphernalia or not."

For some visitors the items displayed are indeed as common as a cup of tea; for others, a bit of an eye opener.