The Museum of Drugs Paraphernalia acts as a patron to musicians and artists that highlight the issues of substance use within contemporary society. Whilst not intending to condone substance use, the Museum recognises that substance use is as much a facet of the current zeitgeist as it is a phenomenon of our cultural history.

This year the Museum has received an overwhelming number of nominations and we are delighted to anounce that the The League of Antiquarians have awarded the Golden Opium Pipe Award 2011 to The Stranglers for their enduring homily to Empire and opium trade in the Nineteenth Century, Golden Brown.

The Stranglers - a brief history courtesy of Wikipedia

Scoring some 23 UK top 40 singles and 17 UK top 40 albums to date in a career spanning five decades, the Stranglers are the longest-surviving and most "continuously successful" band to have originated in the UK punk scene of the mid to late 1970s. Beginning life as the Guildford Stranglers on 11 September 1974 in Guildford, Surrey,[1] they originally built a following within the mid-'70s pub rock scene. While their aggressive, no-compromise attitude identified them as one of the instigators of the UK punk rock scene that followed, their idiosyncratic approach rarely followed any single musical genre and the group went on to explore a variety of musical styles, from new wave, art rock and gothic rock through to the sophisticated pop of some of their 1980s output.