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 post-war era: starting in the jazz world of the northern cities and moving though the "flower power" 1960's to the cocaine and crack explosions of the 1980's and 1990's. |
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