Listen free for 30 days
Listen with offer
-
Dope Girls
- The Birth of the British Drug Underground
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.00 for first 30 days
Dope Girls
Pre-order Now for £14.39
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Summary
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