- Published: 26/09/2024
- ISBN: 9781803511634
- Granta Books
- 256 pages
Dope Girls
Marek Kohn
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 criminalisation of drugs – reissued with added material.
27 November 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 demonisation 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.
£10.99
A fascinating look at cocaine and opium use in Britain after the first world war
Sarah Waters
Excellent
Guardian
The best, most perceptive and most authoritative account of the British drug scene ever. This book is essential reading for doctors, legislators and law enforcers - indeed anyone who seeks to understand the impact that the illegal status of drugs has had on our society and culture
Will Self
From the Same Author
As We Know It
Marek Kohn
As We Know It is an account of how the human mind has evolved. It is a theory of mind: it tells us how our immediate ancestors might have thought and seen the world in the absence of language, gods or culture. Marek Kohn relates that ancient heritage to our humanity and examines the influence of our hominid past on our own behaviour, as creatures who speak, symbolize and create. Central to the book is a meditation on the handaxe, crafted again and again for hundreds of thousands of years by our proto-human ancestors. In his reconstruction of the uses and meaning of the handaxe, Kohn takes us into an alien world that is strangely close to our own. This is a work of sociobiology insofar as it applies Darwinism to human culture. Unlike almost all works of ‘evolutionary psychology’, however, it seeks to recapture Darwinism from the political right and to show that a better understanding of our evolutionary history need not lead to an imposing of limits on who we are and what we may become.
