Dope Girls: The Birth Of The British Drug Underground
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Dope Girls: The Birth Of The British Drug Underground
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Jaimi Barbakoff
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By:
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Marek Kohn
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