Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America's Romance With Illegal Drugs

About this book

"Fascinating, well researched and finely honed... This is a must read."―Judge Peggy F. Hora, California Bench Once upon a time in America, morphine and cocaine were routinely sold in pharmacies, and "hop heads" gathered in shadowy basements to smoke opium. So begins Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams , Jill Jonnes's ground-breaking history of illegal drugs in America. Jonnes vividly traces our first turn-of-the-century drug epidemic, successfully quelled, and then follows the story into the postwar starting in the jazz world of the northern cities and moving through the "flower power" 1960s to the cocaine and crack explosion of the 1980s and 1990s.