Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground - Paperback

by Marek Kohn (Author)

The crime drama TV series Dope Girls, streaming now on Hulu, is based on this book.

Set in post-World War I London, Dope Girls explores the rise of the city's underground nightlife.

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.

Dope Girls is the story of the transformation of drug use (especially morphine and cocaine, which was once commonly available in any pharmacy) into a national menace. In addition to West End musical actress Billie Carleton, 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.

Since it first appeared in 1992, Dope Girls has acquired cult classic status, and has now inspired a BBC drama series of the same name. The 2025 edition is revised and updated with new material.