San Francisco’s prohibitionists worried that opium dens were patronized by “young men and women of respectable parentage” as well as “the vicious and the depraved.”

Around 2 a.m. on Monday, December 6, 1875, a “posse of police” led by Captain William Douglass descended on 609 Dupont Street in San Francisco. The cops arrested Fannie Whitmore, Cora Martinez, James…