The cops are chasing a couple of gangsters they know have been peddling hard drugs. As they speed through the countryside, the brains of the outfit, Nick (Eddie Madison), tells the driver to stop at the diner, gets out and lets the car speed away as a decoy while he escapes with the illegal goods. The waitress is Jane Bradford (Lois January), an innocent girl who is taken in by Nick's tall tale of being chased by crooks and she hides him when the police enter and order a coffee. After they leave, Nick sees an opportunity and gives her something for her headache: a little cocaine, although Jane is unaware that she is now on her way to addiction...
After the world's longest text introduction crawls its way over the screen, it's clear what The Cocaine Fiends is about. Yes, it's that old favourite, the awful warning about drugs film, and is often seen as a companion piece to the camp classic Reefer Madness, but where that film looks ridiculous now, this film deals with a problem that really does devastate lives and continues to do so to this day. This means that knowing and derisive laughs are thin on the ground as Jane is dazzled by the promise of big city lights and a job in showbiz from the duplicitous Nick, and inexorably enters her own personal drug hell.
This film was actually based on a previous one called The Pace that Kills, also the original title here until the catchier one was adopted. Before long, Jane has twigged that all that headache powder, such a pick-me-up, is in fact "dope" and she is an addict who won't even write to her fretting mother back home. We then leave Jane's story behind as we follow her brother Eddie (Dean Benton) who has come to the city to search for her, but they obviously share an addictive gene because Eddie's workmate, Fanny (Sheila Bromley), an associate of Nick's, gives him cocaine to waken him up and visit a nightclub. Then, what do you know?, the brother is an addict too.
The presentation of this film is one step above amateur, but its message is undeniably sincere, even for an exploitation film for here is a film where the sympathetic characters are exploited. At times it appears as a morality play, but almost everyone in it is in a wretched state by the end, which pulls a surprise twist out of keeping with the rest of the film, as if we were watching a mystery. It's really the template for all other drug fear films to follow, from The Man with the Golden Arm to Requiem for a Dream, they all take the form of this making for one of the most predictable genres going. Oddities include the pan away to a coffee pot boiling over when Eddie and Fanny start canoodling, and later Fanny telling him she's pregnant by coyly whispering in his ear, as if not allowed by the censors to say it out loud. Watch out for the two awful musical numbers performed to pad out the (short) running time.
