27 November 1918, London. Just days after the end of the Great War, rising star Billie Carleton took to the stage for the last time. She was found dead the next day; the cause of death ruled to be a cocaine overdose. Within a few years, the story snowballed into a cautionary tale of the relationship between young women, dope and predatory men, drawing from pernicious racist myths and transforming drug use into a social menace.

This is the story of the moral panic that led to the demonisation of drugs in the UK, and an exploration of how narcotics have been used as a means of speaking about gender, race and the nation's place in the world since the turn of the century.