Fascinating, sometimes funny, The Dope Chronicles reproduces actual newspaper pages containing drug stories from 1850-1950. It recreates how we felt about and dealt with the use of opium, cocaine, marijuana, and exotic drugs in our midst. Fifteen major metropolitan newspapers veer in these pages between hysteria over the disintegration of our moral fabric and lurid fascination with the dark underside of the drug world. The Dope Chronicles evokes a time when there were no social drugs, just social menaces.

Gary Silver is head of Yellow Press, the antiquarian clipping bureau which has collected several thousand bound newspaper volumes. Michael Aldrich is custodian of San Francisco's prestigious Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, containing the most comprehensive archives of drug-related literature in the world.