A drug panic. Murder. Terrifying and mysterious black and Chinese immigrants. Dope Kings. Jazz. War. An actress dead of an overdose. Dope Girls is about the transformation of drug use into a national menace.

It revolves around the death in 1918, in the last furious stages of the First World War, of Billie Carleton, a West End-musical actress. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor, and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. Around them, in the streets off Shaftesbury Avenue and in Chinatown, swirled a raffish group of seedy and rebellious hedonists. And so the drug problem was born amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail.