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 era: 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.