BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE – Dope Girls (31/08/2024)

Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground

In 1918, Billie Carleton, a West End actress, came off stage, went partying with friends and was found dead the next morning – apparently of a cocaine overdose. A few years later Freda Kimpton a dancer in Soho bars committed suicide – with cocaine.

These events blew up into a huge media melodrama – with a cast of characters includes villians – Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor and Edgar Manning, a black jazz drummer – and victims, the Dope Girls.

MAREK KOHN whose newly revised cult classic Dope Girls has inspired an upcoming BBC TV series, came to the Bureau to tell us how the moral panic about drugs that kicked off on the 1920s (causing laws that are still with us today), was more about the fear of newly emancipated women in society and the imagined menace of foreigners bound on enslaving them, than about any damage done by the drugs themselves.