Dead End Kids on Acid

A business history of LSD

Brian Doherty from the July 2010 issue

Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, by Nicholas Schou, Thomas Dunne Books, 304 pages, $24.99

Imagined by different advocates as a tool for spiritual reawakening, for political revolution, or for military mind control, LSD has a mysterious power in our bodies that is reflected in its mysterious power in our body politic. As an old acidhead joke goes, LSD is a highly volatile drug that can induce heart palpitations, panic, and paranoia—in those who have never taken it.

Acid’s most hideous wisdom is that it can and will be as beatific, as grinding, as exalted, or as depraved as whatever is within you. America’s biggest LSD popularizer, the disgraced former Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, stressed that your reaction to acid depends on “set and setting”: the attitudes you bring to the experience and the environment surrounding you. Because of acid’s use in government mind control experiments during the 1950s, because of the hyperbolic press coverage that dogged it in the 1960s, and because it was banned by Congress in 1968, the drug’s set and setting in American culture inevitably created bad trips.

The historiography of LSD—which was first synthesized in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, working for the private Sandoz Laboratories—has been spotty but fascinating. Hovering at least as a ghostly presence in most of it has been what is usually described as a tough Orange County, California, motorcycle gang turned blissed-out religious cult turned international drug smuggling ring known by the deliciously ’60s name the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

In their 1985 LSD history Acid Dreams, Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain described the Brotherhood as “a bizarre mélange of evangelical, starry-eyed hippie dealers, mystic alchemists, and fast-money bankers.” Leary was both friend and unofficial guru to the Brotherhood. He described them in his 1982 autobiography Flashbacks as “transfiguring themselves from working class adolescent low riders to apprentice divinities.” He said “there was something magical about this band…outlaws who created a global legend and then disappeared quietly from the scene.” In a 1972 indictment, Orange County’s district attorney falsely portrayed the defrocked professor as their capo di tutti capi in international crime.

Michael Hollingshead, a British adventurer who was one of the earliest suppliers of LSD to Leary, offered the perfect one-line description of the Brotherhood: “the Dead End Kids who took acid and fell in love with beauty.” And while they were at it, built up the largest-volume illegal drug smuggling and distribution network of their time. 

Any cinematic treatment of this story will likely be based on the new book Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, written by Nicholas Schou, a journalist who first wrote about the Brotherhood’s history and lingering after-effects for the OC Weekly in 2005. This is not the first book purporting to tell the clandestine Brotherhood’s full story. In 1984 the British journalists Stewart Tendler and David May issued The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which told the same tale with a wider perspective on the history of LSD, and with some significant differences from Schou’s, mostly in extending the Brotherhood’s story past the point where Schou stops it. Tendler and May also claim a closer relationship between the group and the Mellon heir Billy Hitchcock and the international smuggler (and suspected government provocateur) Ronald Stark. Schou keeps closer to the original Orange County gang, telling the story largely from their perspective.

Schou would have helped those interested in the ongoing scholarly/journalistic project of getting acid’s history straight if he had acknowledged the previous book and explained his reasons for departing from its facts and emphases. Did the O.C. boys he interviewed deny that they had a working partnership with Hitchcock and Stark, or did Schou just think focusing on the original group was a better and tighter way to tell his story? Readers of both books are left to wonder.

Schou’s goal is not to clear the underbrush of acid’s historiography. He just wants to relate, in a largely voiceless and opinionless way, this corking tale of beatific criminals, pioneering smugglers, alien-loving rock stars, and staggering quantities of drugs. His reporting is diligent, and his story comes mostly from the mouths of participants speaking for the first time on the record after decades of hiding deep underground.

That story deserves to be told. While Leary was not, contra Orange County’s D.A., the Brotherhood’s mastermind, the guru’s largely libertarian approach to acid makes it fitting that he plays a central role in this story of how a drug associated with government experimentation and elite curiosity leaped into the roiling waters of free (albeit black) markets.

The Brotherhood boys were mostly shiftless surfer, motorcycle, and car thugs from beach towns in Orange County in the early 1960s. Only one of them lacked a criminal record, so he signed their incorporation papers in 1966. They were allegedly dedicated to promoting the ideals of an eclectic set of spiritual leaders, from Christ to Krishna. Aboveground, they ran the Mystic Arts World shop in Laguna Beach, selling the accoutrements of spiritually inclined hippieism. Secretly (sort of) they grew into gigantic distributors of pot from Mexico, hash from Afghanistan, and LSD from both the legendary Grateful Dead soundman and outlaw chemist Augustus Stanley Owsley III and, later, the Owsley disciple Timothy Scully and Scully’s disciple Nick Sand.

Prior to officially becoming the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in 1966 (which happened a month after California banned LSD), the boys had already built up a thriving pot business, smuggling the goods from Mexico. Then their leader, “Farmer John” Griggs, decided to rob at gunpoint a Hollywood party after he heard that the attendees had lots of this new wonder drug he’d heard about. Acid changed his life, helped him beat heroin, and led him and his friends on an amazing journey. His old crony and Brotherhood mainstay Edward Padilla said the pre-acid Griggs was “a sneaky, manipulative little bastard.” Afterward, he had a magical charisma that reportedly made every acid trip with him into a life-changing experience, be you banker or Buddhist. Leary dubbed him “the holiest man to live in this country.”

No acid story is complete without the contentious Leary. Griggs, like so many acidheads in the mid-’60s, looked up to the professor, and he visited him at his upstate New York Millbrook estate in 1966. When the Millbrook experiment was shut down by Leary’s sponsor Hitchcock, Griggs invited Leary and his family essentially to move in with the Brotherhood, which they did, spending most of 1967 to 1969 with the O.C. saints and smugglers, at first in Laguna Beach and then at a more remote ranch near Idyllwild in the Southern California desert. 

Leary had enough public twists and turns in his attitudes and advocacy that it’s easy for anyone to find a version they can hate or love. The Leary of this moment was part mys-tic (he inspired the Brotherhood to organize themselves as a quasi-church) and part political leader (he launched an aborted run for governor of California from the Brotherhood ranch). Against the wishes of early allies such as Aldous Huxley and British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (the man who coined the term psychedelic) and his academic sponsors at Harvard, Leary didn’t think access to acid needed to be controlled by a mandarin class. He was perhaps recklessly laissez-faire and capitalist in his approach to LSD, thinking that anyone should be free to alter his own consciousness and adopting the marketing strategy of media guru Marshall McLuhan by “advertising” the drug though his public persona. (Always smile!)

Leary therefore was willing to give his imprimatur to the new youth hero, the “righteous dealer.” The Brotherhood made their big money smuggling pot and hash. The acid they took more seriously as a sacrament, and Brotherhood members would give away thousands of hits—even dropping them from small aircraft—at big rock festivals and youth gatherings.

Comments

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Or this
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