Cocaine is the story of a young man who runs off to Paris to seek fame, fortune, and fun. Pitigrilli’s classic novel charts the comedy and pathos of a young man's a tragic trajectory. Tito Arnaudi is a dandified hero with several mistresses he juggles. A failed medical student, Tito is hired as a journalist in Paris, where he investigates cocaine dens and invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths that he sells to newspapers as his own life becomes more outrageous than his phony press reports.