Open the Doors of perception, alter your consciousness
Do You have Prince Albert in a can?Then you’d better let him out.
The Prince Albert can gave one an excuse to have cigarette papers. The can full of marijuana was called a lid, still the name of the basic unit for selling ganja, or marijuana.
When most people hear the word hippie, their next thought is Drugs!
While not untrue, they need to define both their terms to get the true picture. There were many types of people called hippies, just as there are many varieties of drugs. Lumping the benign marijuana with truly addictive drugs under the sobriquet DRUGS and declaring war on it was a Nixon idea that hasn’t improved with time. Remember this was Nixon’s reaction to the Congressional 1970 report that found marijuana should be legalized and thus better controlled.
People who couldn’t buy into a rat race to achieve some ticky-tacky rewards of questionable value usually referred to themselves as freaks. (See the song ‘Little Boxes’ now heard at the start of Weeds) The flamboyantly visible freaks were labeled hippies by the media.
In the late 60s when we freaks began to emerge from small and large towns everywhere, the only thing we had in common really was a yearning for something different. It was sort of a response to growing up on the cold war battlefield huddling under your desk to protect yourself from nuclear attack (?); an early, “Can’t we all just get along?” response. Freaks decided at least we could do our small part to live in a yellow submarine and avoid materialism as much as we could.
The media derided hippies, but many freaks did not fit their definition. Some freaks played dress up much of the time. These were the ones the media named hippies. Many other freaks dressed and looked like mainstream “straight” society most of the time. Men had trouble hiding beards and long hair, but many hippie women passed as straight in the work-a-day world with just a change of clothes. Those hippies on the street downtown were just the visible tip of a subculture of freaks. Young idealistic flower children and hardened civil disobedience veterans were all freaks because they felt they couldn’t get no satisfaction from the Great Society.
We had grown up in a world where miracle drugs had improved our lives at every step. As kids we knew people crippled by polio and odds were many of our generation would have followed. Then we swallowed a sugar cube from Salk, and that prospect all but vanished. Better living through chemistry. Later many tried another drug on a sugar cube.
Freaks came in all kinds, especially when it came to drugs. In Atlanta members of one of the best known freak bands of the late 60s never even tried cigarettes or drank alcohol much less tried any drugs, but they were still very much freaks. To identify what people were “in to”, “their trip”, there were freak subgroups like music freaks, vegetarian freaks, Jesus freaks, etc.
The philosophy of most freaks was and is still,” Don’t force your trip!” meaning this may be enjoyable and marvelous to you, but realize it may not strike others the same. Each person has their own trip, or set of experiences and baggage as they travel through life, don’t let your ego sit in judgment, just continue on your own trip. The only exception was when someone was in danger or too obviously out of it. We were, after all, our brothers’ and sisters’ helpers in a community aborning.
Now some freaks sought enlightment and illumination by their path, but most heads just wanted to get high A head sought ways to get extreme experiences with and without drugs. Getting high in some way was a central activity of most heads. Some of the biggest heads did not look like hippies I think the extreme was illustrated by a friend who reported to the Atlanta draft center early in 1968 and was asked,” Do you do drugs?”
He replied,” Why, What drugs do you have?”
They asked which ones he had used and, since he wanted to be found unfit for the draft, he listed everything he had used or ever heard about being used by some freak trying to get high. The length of the list and how many common items were listed dumbfounded them. My friend calmly explained to the psychiatrist how each could be misused. They respectfully rejected him, but soon revised their have-you-ever-used list to include many of his suggestions.
Maryjane (1968) theatrical trailer
Marijuana served as a “gateway drug” only because it opened your eyes to official hypocrisy and took you past a social taboo. The majority of hippie freaks went through a ritual of initiation by being turned on to marijuana by a trusted friend. That decision to try something the authorities had told such incredible horror stories about was like stepping through the looking glass. It was a choice you willingly, if timorously, sought. Once you survived, and even enjoyed the experience, you had a seed of doubt about these authorities that had been so more than wrong. Unfortunately some people took that realization to an extreme and concluded the official story even on things like heroin must be also lies. Thus the insanity of the lumping so many varied substances as the boogie man DRUGS.
Hippies main drugs of choice were marijuana and psychedelics. Marijuana was the social lubricant for most freaks in the 60s-70s. Sharing marijuana with a new friend was a bonding, sometimes like “sharing water” in “Stranger in a Strange Land”. ‘Smoking dope’ we called it as a giggle on the official lies. The ritual of rolling a joint or prepping a pipe then passing it repeatedly around the circle as everyone talked and laughed was very bonding. Whenever freak friends met up and it was cool, they shared the pipe of peace, marijuana smoke.
Freaks into the herb were always on the look out for the new experience to be enhanced by being herb high. Physical labor was a rush stoned. Much of Atlanta’s suburbs were built in the late sixties, early seventies by Grateful Deadhead carpenters stoned as much as they could manage. I knew three crews of about six guys who worked together, shared a house with girlfriends, worked full out for three months then followed concerts all over the southeast for a month or so before returning to the job.
Popular culture of the times show how marijuana was pervasive. Finally in 1970, Congress established the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse to study marijuana and make recommendations about how to control its use. The Commission’s final report recommended decriminalization of simple possession, finding:
[T]he criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession even in the effort to discourage use. It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only ‘with the greatest reluctance.
Yet President Nixon ignored the Commission’s findings and launched an all-out war on marijuana users and increased intrusion and collision with youth culture. This unified many freaks who felt used by an unresponsive government eager to send them to Vietnam while pushing them outside the law at home. The government response was to lower many states’ drinking age to 18, draft age. Alcohol was still the acceptable gateway drug for kids.
Every new generation has to find its own way, but generational differences had a different shimmer in the sixties because of psychedelics. Turn on, tune in and drop out was a media sensation. It was simultaneously condemned and admired. Psychology had become cutting edge in the early sixties now we found the world was within. As reports filtered back first from intellectuals and artists, then celebrities of psychedelic breakthroughs clearing mental cobwebs, LSD became cool in the media. Anti-drug warriors had to manufacture horror stories or use CIA COINTELPRO reports of mental breakdowns engineered under duress to support their spurious claims. But it failed. Even scared people were curious to see this new dimension. Some freaks took the next step into a psychedelic experience. Freaks who were students pored over anthropology writings to discover new highs from nature, while chemists synthesized and tested known psychedelics and new chemicals. In South Georgia people discovered LSD was a synthesized version of compounds in the morning glory seeds for sale at the hardware store and psilocybin mushrooms sprouted in cow pastures after every rain.
The psychedelic experience changes the way you look at the possibilities in life. There is no path back to unenlightenment. A bell can’t be unrung.
Marijuana and psychedelics were standard fare for freaks called hippies. Many lived a dual existence in this reality and wonderland. They were called acid freaks or acidheads. The large festivals like Woodstock and Byron showed a society experimenting with integrating informed drug use into daily life.
Without a framework of support, many who were unprepared or unstable had bad drug experiences. Many drug users went to extremes and “burned out” or fried themselves mentally for a while. Hippies all knew people who had bad trips, and later knew folks who overdosed. Most recovered, but not all. It was a steep learning curve for individuals and society.
The Strip Project can’t ignore the 300 Lb. Dancing Shiva of drug use, so we wish to collect hippie tales of drug culture as popular culture documents. Drug use is a personal decision and is not advocated, but such tales are a vital part of the history of hippies.
Electrical Banana , gonna be the very next craze… 1967 goes bananas! Smoke bananas to get high? The story of the national hippie joke that was taken oh so seriously. jm_Believer_Bananas
Read “The Man who Turned on the World” free http://www.psychedelic-library.org/hollings.htm