Dope Girls: The Birth Of The British Drug Underground

Marek Kohn

mar 2013 · Granta Books

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This is a discussion of the transformation of drug use (especially morphine and cocaine, which was once commonly available in any chemist's shop) into a national menace. It revolves around the death of Billie Carleton, a West End musical actress, in 1918. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. They were eventually identified as the villains of the affair and invested with a highly charged sexual menace. Around them, in the streets off Shaftesbury Avenue, there swirled a raffish group of seedy and entitled hedonists. Britain was horrified and fascinated, and so the drug problem was born amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail.

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Marek Kohn is the author of several books, including Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, The Race Gallery and As We Know it. He lives in Brighton with his family.