There are many very fine non-fiction books written about drugs and the number grows each year. But over time a handful stay the course and become classics that stand out from the crowd for their originality and insight. Marek Kohn’s 1992 book Dope Girls  is undoubtedly in this category. I was delighted to be interviewed about it recently for a History Hit podcast and you can hear what I had to say here.

One of the most significant aspects of Kohn’s book is the focus on gender and the role of women in the history of drugs in the early twentieth century. As I discuss in my own recent book, Rethinking Drug Laws, this is arguably one of the most pivotal periods in the history of our present approach to drugs and it is striking that at precisely this critical historical moment, women are leading players in the story. I wrote about this historical puzzle some years ago in a short paper that directly engaged with Dope Girls. Making sense of the story that Kohn so vividly tells is not straightforward but ultimately involves putting the history of drugs into conversation with wider histories of war, empire and social change. 100 years later, we can still learn a great deal from the events Kohn describes in 1920s London.

Many of these ideas are explored in my own podcast, Drug Talk, available here or on standard platforms including Spotify.