Dope Girls by Marek Kohn
DOPE GIRLS: THE BIRTH OF THE BRITISH DRUG UNDERGROUND
Now a major BBC TV series: a tour through the seedier side of Britain between the wars, and the moral panic that led to the criminalization of drugs.
November 27, 1918, London. Just days after the end of the Great War, rising star Billie Carleton took to the stage for the last time. She was found dead the next day; the cause of death ruled to be a cocaine overdose. Within a few years, the story snowballed into a cautionary tale of the relationship between young women, dope and predatory men, drawing from pernicious racist myths and transforming drug use into a social menace.
This is the story of the moral panic that led to the demonization of drugs in the UK, and an exploration of how narcotics have been used as a means of speaking about gender, race and the nation’s place in the world since the turn of the century.
Since it first appeared in 1992, Dope Girls has acquired cult classic status. This 2024 edition is revised and updated with new material.
From the Introduction:
The first British underground drug scene took shape in a country traumatized by war, beset by fears of danger from abroad, and bewildered by the upheavals that women were causing as they claimed spaces hitherto assumed to be exclusively from men. Drugs came to be seen as a menace to society during the First World War and its aftermath, taking the nation by surprise. Novel, startling and disturbing, they were seen as a morbid symptom of an onrushing modernity that challenged the existing order at every level, from the imperial to the personal. The moral panic they triggered was a chorus of alarms about a changing world centered upon the behaviour of young women, with external threats personified by men of colour. In telling the story of London’s first drug underground and the people who were part of it, Dope Girls examines an outbreak of patriarchal anxiety in an imperial nation. Distant as it is, the episode speaks eloquently to concerns that preoccupy us more than 100 years later.
Look for some new discoveries in this 2024 edition of Dope Girls including “the most sensational revelation yet” about indicted drug dealer Reggie de Veulle originally found in Kevin Taylor’s 2021 essay The Victory Ball.
A six-part historical drama television series based on Marek Kohn’s, book Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, developed by Bad Wolf in association with Sony Pictures Television for BBC One, will be released in 2025. Here is the trailer.
Purchase Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground
There’s an audiobook version too, read by Jaimi Barbakoff.
- Published: 26/09/2024
- ISBN: 9781803511634
- Granta Books
- 256 pages