Lsd And The Hippie Movement

The Hippie movement

In the middle of the 1960’s decade, a brand-new subculture bloomed throughout the United States in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, preaching the Flower Power movement and the aversion of the previous generation’s way of thinking. They were those who wanted to express their disapproval of Puritanical sexual norms, who fought against authority and consumption society. This powerful community was known as hippies. Countless pictures and stereotypes might come to one’s mind when he hears the word “hippie”: A neglected youngster with long sloppy hair and beard, wearing flashy-colored shirts and pants, smoking hemp and taking LSD all day long, sitting in circle near police officers to protest against the government

Indeed, the frequent use of drugs was in the hippies’ mores. LSD was the most usual and common drug of the actual San Francisco Hippie scene. Indeed, many people might think that marijuana was more popular at the time, but hippies preferred LSD, because of the intense effects provided to the users. Still, marijuana was also prevalent, but did not have that “magical trip acid offered” (Tamarkin, 146). Created by Albert Hofmann in 1938, LSD was first used in psychological therapies until in the early 1960’s when a Harvard teacher called Timothy Leary tried it. After an intense trip, he began distributing doses among his friends and students. Since this moment, the drug began to spread into the brand-new hippie subculture. In 1965, a Berkeley chemist went to Los Angeles and cooked up an incredible amount of doses of LSD. He went back to San Francisco and started giving it away to underground crowds like the well-known “Merry Pranksters”. These people often organized parties (known as “Acid tests”) during which LSD was offered free. These parties were a big attraction in San Francisco, with hundreds of people being high and psychedelic music being played. The authorities were not in favor of this drug spreading surging in their town, hence the prohibition of acid in the whole country in October 1966. However, the constraint did not lead to a decrease of LSD consummation, far from it. Indeed, with the Hippie movement spreading all over the rest of the United States and the Occidental world in the late sixties, drug usage increased