*Interesting that, after 40 years, these acid-dazed dropout adventurers can now be back-read as a "mafia" and a "cartel."
*One wonders what would have happened if LSD had been open-sourced and had
never been worth any money. Much like marijuana and alcohol, that drug could be
likely created in massive bulk by lazy hobbyists if it wasn't illegal.
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book24-2010mar24,0,2597283.story
(...)
By decade's end, the psychedelic messengers had sidetracked into a smuggling operation that made the group one of the largest drug cartels in America.
Instead of enlightenment, the members of the brotherhood wound up making their mark as narcotics trailblazers: They distributed Orange Sunshine, arguably the most popular "brand" of LSD in history; created the strain of pot known as Maui Wowie; and were the first to bring Afghan hash to the U.S.
For a while, they were America's foremost counterculture outlaws, dubbed the "hippie mafia" by Rolling Stone. But the organization ultimately fell prey to greed, back-stabbing and legal heat. And when it was gone, it barely registered an acid flashback, even after biographers, documentarians and Madison Avenue began to strip mine the hippie era for material.
Yet in "Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World," Nicholas Schou manages – amazingly – to penetrate four decades of silence.
A staff writer at OC Weekly, Schou first wrote about the brotherhood for that paper in 2005, and now he's unfurled a true-life ghost story, interviewing dozens in and around the brotherhood's orbit, many of whom are talking on the record for the first time.
The result is a mind-blowing scrap of found history, like something buried deep in the earth – and you cannot avert your eyes. It's a bizarre tale in which freakazoid suburban 1960s kids live recklessly, blissfully unaware of just how close to the edge they are.
The roots of the brotherhood can be traced to Anaheim in the early 1960s, when Orange County was an "American Graffiti" landscape of hot rods and hoodlums. One such figure was John Griggs, just another average low-grade dealer and user – until he dropped acid in 1965 and became a devotee of Timothy Leary's lysergic philosophy and a pied piper for the promotion of hallucinogenic drugs....
via @nilanjanaroy, who seems to read more books than anybody I know.
