In this entertaining and illuminating book. Marek Kohn vividly records the cocaine scandals and moral panics which followed the end of the First World War, as drug use (especially of opium and cocaine, only criminalized in 1916) was transformed into a national menace. The cast of characters includes Billie Carleton, a West End musical actress, whose highly publicized death from an overdose in 1918 fuelled public anxiety; Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor, and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica -- identified as the villains of the affair and invested with a highly charged sexual menace. Around them in the streets off Shaftesbury Avenue and in Chinatown there swirled a raffish group of seedy and rebellious hedonists. Britain was horrified and fascinated. The drug problem was born, amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail. The timely reissue of this cult classic, with a new afterwoord by the author, reveals the roots of today's drug 'crisis' and provides crucial background for the current debate about de-criminalization. Book jacket.