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Dope Girls

The Birth of the British Drug Underground

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Dope Girls

By: Marek Kohn
Narrated by: Jaimi Barbakoff
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About this listen

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.

A fascinating look at cocaine and opium use in Britain after the First World War - Sarah Waters, Sunday Times

©1992 Marek Kohn (P)2024 W.F. Howes Ltd.
Great Britain Mental Health Psychology Social Sciences

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