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WATCH: When Laguna Beach Was the LSD
Capital of the Universe
December 14, 2011 - patch.com
Timothy Leary, the Brotherhood
of Eternal Love, Dodge City, Mystic Arts World, and a Laguna Beach
history some would prefer to forget.
(See more videos at the story link above)
In these exclusive videos, writer Nick Schou, author of Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of
Eternal Love and its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World
(just released in paperback), takes Patch readers on a tour of several
key locations from Laguna Beach's late-'60s/early-'70s heyday when the
city became the international capital of LSD trafficking.
Hey—why isn't that in the
tourist brochures?
Maybe it should be, it was quite a time. A time when a gaggle of
surfers barely out of their teens formed the Brotherhood of Eternal
Love, which started out as a quasi-spiritual group but eventually
evolved into a notorious drug cartel—nicknamed the Hippie Mafia—that
made regular runs to Afghanistan, smuggling hashish in hollowed-out
surfboards.
Laguna Beach was the Brotherhood's epicenter, in places like Laguna
Canyon's Woodland Drive (dubbed Dodge City on account of all the police
raids that took place there), South Laguna's Monterey Drive, where a
Brotherhood member was fatally shot during a police raid (which made
members realize just how dangerous their enterprise had become), and
Mystic Arts World, a head shop on Coast Highway that was its defacto
headquarters.
Then there was the Gathering of the Tribes rock fest over Christmas
1970, a Brotherhood-sponsored acid-washed (literally!) extravaganza
held in the canyon about where the 73 toll road now runs. According to
rumors, quite a stash is still buried there beneath the dirt ...
If you want more details—on how Jimi Hendrix got involved with the
Brotherhood, on Timothy Leary's Woodland Drive bust that made the
career of a future Laguna Beach police chief, and on why the mere
mentioning of the name John Griggs is still a conversation-stopper in
some Laguna Beach circles—you'll have to pick up Schou's book.
But meanwhile, check out these clips, which include four
extended-length videos of Schou providing narration at several sites
that you won't read about in most Laguna Beach travel stories.
-------------------- Nothing I say or do is factual; every single thing I write is a work of fiction. Got no idea what I'm talking about here~
"Once in awhile, you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right"~ (Grateful Dead)
"o puer, qui omnia nomini debes"; "You, boy, who owe's everything to a name"~ Mark Anthony
"Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum."; "Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system."~ Cicero