A high-school girl gets involved with a ring of teenage marijuana smokers and starts down the road to ruin. A reporter poses as a soda jerk to infiltrate the gang of teen dope fiends.

Young girls are cheated into rigged gambling games and then forced into prostitution to pay off their debts.

Two sisters from Indiana, the wide-eyed and innocent Mae Thorpe, and her more streetwise sister June, move into the Rolf House for Homeless Girls in New York. With June's help, Mae obtains a job as a stenographer for the scientist Joseph von Schraeder, while June gets work as a telegraph operator at Western Union.

A small-time hood shoots his way to the top, but how long can he stay there?