Orange Sunshine
2010 Book & Movie
Support - Orange Sunshine: The Movie - [poster on left below]
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1129325982/orange-sunshine-a-documentary-portrait-of-the-last
Disambiguation: William Kirkley and Rudy Barr are producing a film called "Orange Sunshine",
but this is a different project from Nick Schou's book [cover on right] of the same name and his videos.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1129325982/orange-sunshine-a-documentary-portrait-of-the-last
Disambiguation: William Kirkley and Rudy Barr are producing a film called "Orange Sunshine",
but this is a different project from Nick Schou's book [cover on right] of the same name and his videos.
PREVIEW Nick Schou's BOOK
http://books.google.com/books?id=OmDd9XKZ6hoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://books.google.com/books?id=OmDd9XKZ6hoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Afterword:
Unfortunately, I find it necessary to write an afterword, as this book is attracting some controversy from within the psychedelic community. The main charge is that the book is error-ridden and inaccurate, the reason being that key participants were not interviewed and some of those who were may have had their own vested interests in providing misleading information. Nick Schou has told me that he made every effort to interview key protagonists including, for example, Nick Sand, who declined several interview requests. Others who denied requests remain anonymous. At the same time, I feel it necessary to point out that Schou did interview a lot of former members of the Brotherhood as well as their family or other hangers-on, thus while it is certainly possible that the book contains some errors, distortions, or omissions, it is impossible to dismiss it as being poorly researched. It clearly and obviously isn't.
Unfortunately, I find it necessary to write an afterword, as this book is attracting some controversy from within the psychedelic community. The main charge is that the book is error-ridden and inaccurate, the reason being that key participants were not interviewed and some of those who were may have had their own vested interests in providing misleading information. Nick Schou has told me that he made every effort to interview key protagonists including, for example, Nick Sand, who declined several interview requests. Others who denied requests remain anonymous. At the same time, I feel it necessary to point out that Schou did interview a lot of former members of the Brotherhood as well as their family or other hangers-on, thus while it is certainly possible that the book contains some errors, distortions, or omissions, it is impossible to dismiss it as being poorly researched. It clearly and obviously isn't.
Disambiguation: William Kirkley and Rudy Barr are producing a film called "Orange Sunshine",
but this is a different project from Nick Schou's book [cover on right] of the same name and his videos. BEL appreciates your support of both artistic projects.
but this is a different project from Nick Schou's book [cover on right] of the same name and his videos. BEL appreciates your support of both artistic projects.
Orange Sunshine:
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love & Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love & Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World
Few stories in the annals of American counterculture are as intriguing or dramatic as that of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
Dubbed the “Hippie Mafia,” the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California. After discovering LSD, they took to Timothy Leary’s mantra of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process.
Just days after California became the first state in the union to ban LSD, the Brotherhood formed a legally registered church in its headquarters at Mystic Arts World on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, where they sold blankets and other countercultural paraphernalia retrieved through surfing safaris and road trips to exotic locales in Asia and South America. Before long, they also began to sell Afghan hashish, Hawaiian pot (the storied “Maui Wowie”), and eventually Colombian cocaine, much of which the Brotherhood smuggled to California in secret compartments inside surfboards and Volkswagen minibuses driven across the border.
They also befriended Leary himself, enlisting him in the goal of buying a tropical island where they could install the former Harvard philosophy professor and acid prophet as the high priest of an experimental utopia. The Brotherhood’s most legendary contribution to the drug scene was homemade: Orange Sunshine, the group’s nickname for their trademark orange-colored acid tablet that happened to produce an especially powerful trip. Brotherhood foot soldiers passed out handfuls of the tablets to communes, at Grateful Dead concerts, and at love-ins up and down the coast of California and beyond. The Hell’s Angels, Charles Mason and his followers, and the unruly crowd at the infamous Altamont music festival all tripped out on this acid. Jimi Hendrix even appeared in a film starring Brotherhood members and performed a private show for the fugitive band of outlaws on the slope of a Hawaiian volcano.
Journalist Nicholas Schou takes us deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews with both the group’s surviving members as well as the cops who chased them. A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll (and more drugs) that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of peace and free love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia.
Dubbed the “Hippie Mafia,” the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California. After discovering LSD, they took to Timothy Leary’s mantra of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process.
Just days after California became the first state in the union to ban LSD, the Brotherhood formed a legally registered church in its headquarters at Mystic Arts World on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, where they sold blankets and other countercultural paraphernalia retrieved through surfing safaris and road trips to exotic locales in Asia and South America. Before long, they also began to sell Afghan hashish, Hawaiian pot (the storied “Maui Wowie”), and eventually Colombian cocaine, much of which the Brotherhood smuggled to California in secret compartments inside surfboards and Volkswagen minibuses driven across the border.
They also befriended Leary himself, enlisting him in the goal of buying a tropical island where they could install the former Harvard philosophy professor and acid prophet as the high priest of an experimental utopia. The Brotherhood’s most legendary contribution to the drug scene was homemade: Orange Sunshine, the group’s nickname for their trademark orange-colored acid tablet that happened to produce an especially powerful trip. Brotherhood foot soldiers passed out handfuls of the tablets to communes, at Grateful Dead concerts, and at love-ins up and down the coast of California and beyond. The Hell’s Angels, Charles Mason and his followers, and the unruly crowd at the infamous Altamont music festival all tripped out on this acid. Jimi Hendrix even appeared in a film starring Brotherhood members and performed a private show for the fugitive band of outlaws on the slope of a Hawaiian volcano.
Journalist Nicholas Schou takes us deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews with both the group’s surviving members as well as the cops who chased them. A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll (and more drugs) that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of peace and free love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia.
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The Brotherhood
Most of us surfers who were around at the time, but not involved with them, merely knew of them as "The Brotherhood." Here's an excerpt of: "Eternal Sunshine Director William A. Kirkley rediscovers the dark side of OC’s Summer of Love," By NICK SCHOU
Thursday, Orange County Weekly, June 7, 2007:
----------------------
... Orange County’s secret history as the nation’s onetime epicenter for LSD.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1129325982/orange-sunshine-a-documentary-portrait-of-the-last
see trailer here.
... William A. Kirkley presented a trailer for his upcoming documentary Orange Sunshine, the true story of Orange County’s Brotherhood of Eternal Love, also known as the Hippie Mafia. The movie depicts the unbelievable rise and fall of Timothy Leary’s legendary cult — which started as a group of Laguna Beach surfers and quickly became the world’s largest acid, hash and marijuana distribution network.
The group’s headquarters, a Laguna Beach head shop called Mystic Arts World, mysteriously burned down in 1970, and two years later, law enforcement indicted several dozen members of the group. Those who weren’t arrested fled overseas. The story of the Brotherhood is one of the strangest chapters of American counter-cultural history, yet 40 years after its inception during the so-called Summer of Love, it’s one that remains little-understood and, outside the confines of Laguna Canyon, all but unknown.
That fact isn’t completely coincidental. Many people associated with the Brotherhood continue to live underground, believing they could end up in jail if authorities learn their true identities. Several members of the group lived under assumed names until the mid-1990s, when they were finally tracked down and arrested. Meanwhile, other people who weren’t really in the Brotherhood have made a career out of hyping a self-proclaimed connection.
As one former member — who spoke on the condition of anonymity — told me, “If you remember it, you weren’t there.”
Fortunately, enough people who were really there and who do remember what happened are now helping Kirkley tell the tale. The film’s title comes from the name of the orange-colored acid tabs the Brotherhood printed up by the thousand in Laguna Canyon and then distributed to Grateful Dead shows and communes around the country in their effort to fuel the nation’s psychedelic revolution, which they hoped would eventually lead to a nationwide spiritual awakening.
Kirkley, 28, grew up in Newport Beach... His father-in-law, a former Laguna Beach resident who had peripheral involvement with the Brotherhood, told him about this crazy band of surfer hippies in Laguna Canyon who once tried to sell enough acid to buy an island where Timothy Leary would reign as a demigod. Then — shameless self-promotion alert — Kirkley read my Weekly feature story about the Brotherhood (“Lords of Acid,” July 8, 2005), and he was hooked.
“I couldn’t believe that OC had this kind of hidden past, this secret history you would never expect in such a conservative place,” Kirkley says.
... [around 2001, Kirkley's wife's] father, Don, who had spent time in Laguna Canyon in the 1960s, regaled Kirkley with tales of the Brotherhood and urged him to consider making a documentary about the group. “I told [Kirkley] that not only are a lot of us getting older now and some are already dead, but there is also a critical mass happening with the Brotherhood,” Don says. “People have always been pushing me to tell this story because it’s never been told.”
After reading “Lords of Acid,” Kirkley says he realized his father-in-law’s stories about Laguna Beach’s hidden past could make a great movie. He began researching the Brotherhood. He tracked down rare archival footage. He convinced one of the artists who ran with the group to share posters and other mementos as visual aids in the film. He also interviewed numerous veterans of the group, many of whom were profiled in “Lords of Acid” but were initially reluctant to appear on camera.
You can find Kirkley’s trailer on YouTube by typing in the words “Orange Sunshine” and “Kirkley.” Among the ex-Brotherhood figures featured in the trailer are “Thumper,” an Orange County businessman who ran away from home at age 14 to live with his sister in a Laguna Canyon house. Thumper went on surfing trips with John Gale, one of the Brotherhood’s legendary leaders, and later became a major drug dealer in his own right. Kirkley also interviewed Robert “Stubby” Tierney, a major Brotherhood smuggler who did a stint in federal prison, then changed his name and became a television and music-video producer before losing everything. A born-again Christian, Tierney now lives in a senior center in Newport Beach.
(Full disclosure: Also appearing is yours truly as a supposed “expert” on the Brotherhood. Besides the story I wrote two years ago, I’m also working on a book about the group and am sharing information from my reporting with Kirkley. Once the film gets made, I will get a writing credit.)
Helping Kirkley are several colleagues from the commercial-production company where he works. He’s currently meeting with potential distributors. One prominent OC-based surfwear manufacturer expressed interest in the film but backed off after realizing the movie’s hallucino-centric content violated the company’s anti-drug policy. “We have all these great people in place,” Kirkley says. “Everyone really believes in the project, and we just have to get somebody to help make it.”
Most of us surfers who were around at the time, but not involved with them, merely knew of them as "The Brotherhood." Here's an excerpt of: "Eternal Sunshine Director William A. Kirkley rediscovers the dark side of OC’s Summer of Love," By NICK SCHOU
Thursday, Orange County Weekly, June 7, 2007:
----------------------
... Orange County’s secret history as the nation’s onetime epicenter for LSD.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1129325982/orange-sunshine-a-documentary-portrait-of-the-last
see trailer here.
... William A. Kirkley presented a trailer for his upcoming documentary Orange Sunshine, the true story of Orange County’s Brotherhood of Eternal Love, also known as the Hippie Mafia. The movie depicts the unbelievable rise and fall of Timothy Leary’s legendary cult — which started as a group of Laguna Beach surfers and quickly became the world’s largest acid, hash and marijuana distribution network.
The group’s headquarters, a Laguna Beach head shop called Mystic Arts World, mysteriously burned down in 1970, and two years later, law enforcement indicted several dozen members of the group. Those who weren’t arrested fled overseas. The story of the Brotherhood is one of the strangest chapters of American counter-cultural history, yet 40 years after its inception during the so-called Summer of Love, it’s one that remains little-understood and, outside the confines of Laguna Canyon, all but unknown.
That fact isn’t completely coincidental. Many people associated with the Brotherhood continue to live underground, believing they could end up in jail if authorities learn their true identities. Several members of the group lived under assumed names until the mid-1990s, when they were finally tracked down and arrested. Meanwhile, other people who weren’t really in the Brotherhood have made a career out of hyping a self-proclaimed connection.
As one former member — who spoke on the condition of anonymity — told me, “If you remember it, you weren’t there.”
Fortunately, enough people who were really there and who do remember what happened are now helping Kirkley tell the tale. The film’s title comes from the name of the orange-colored acid tabs the Brotherhood printed up by the thousand in Laguna Canyon and then distributed to Grateful Dead shows and communes around the country in their effort to fuel the nation’s psychedelic revolution, which they hoped would eventually lead to a nationwide spiritual awakening.
Kirkley, 28, grew up in Newport Beach... His father-in-law, a former Laguna Beach resident who had peripheral involvement with the Brotherhood, told him about this crazy band of surfer hippies in Laguna Canyon who once tried to sell enough acid to buy an island where Timothy Leary would reign as a demigod. Then — shameless self-promotion alert — Kirkley read my Weekly feature story about the Brotherhood (“Lords of Acid,” July 8, 2005), and he was hooked.
“I couldn’t believe that OC had this kind of hidden past, this secret history you would never expect in such a conservative place,” Kirkley says.
... [around 2001, Kirkley's wife's] father, Don, who had spent time in Laguna Canyon in the 1960s, regaled Kirkley with tales of the Brotherhood and urged him to consider making a documentary about the group. “I told [Kirkley] that not only are a lot of us getting older now and some are already dead, but there is also a critical mass happening with the Brotherhood,” Don says. “People have always been pushing me to tell this story because it’s never been told.”
After reading “Lords of Acid,” Kirkley says he realized his father-in-law’s stories about Laguna Beach’s hidden past could make a great movie. He began researching the Brotherhood. He tracked down rare archival footage. He convinced one of the artists who ran with the group to share posters and other mementos as visual aids in the film. He also interviewed numerous veterans of the group, many of whom were profiled in “Lords of Acid” but were initially reluctant to appear on camera.
You can find Kirkley’s trailer on YouTube by typing in the words “Orange Sunshine” and “Kirkley.” Among the ex-Brotherhood figures featured in the trailer are “Thumper,” an Orange County businessman who ran away from home at age 14 to live with his sister in a Laguna Canyon house. Thumper went on surfing trips with John Gale, one of the Brotherhood’s legendary leaders, and later became a major drug dealer in his own right. Kirkley also interviewed Robert “Stubby” Tierney, a major Brotherhood smuggler who did a stint in federal prison, then changed his name and became a television and music-video producer before losing everything. A born-again Christian, Tierney now lives in a senior center in Newport Beach.
(Full disclosure: Also appearing is yours truly as a supposed “expert” on the Brotherhood. Besides the story I wrote two years ago, I’m also working on a book about the group and am sharing information from my reporting with Kirkley. Once the film gets made, I will get a writing credit.)
Helping Kirkley are several colleagues from the commercial-production company where he works. He’s currently meeting with potential distributors. One prominent OC-based surfwear manufacturer expressed interest in the film but backed off after realizing the movie’s hallucino-centric content violated the company’s anti-drug policy. “We have all these great people in place,” Kirkley says. “Everyone really believes in the project, and we just have to get somebody to help make it.”
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Ever see the movie "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World?" My favorite character is the lifeguard from California. You first see him dancing with his beatnik girlfriend in his beach pad. That movie was made in 1962, right before the hippies arrived on the scene. But you can recognize their precursers in those beach party beatniks. I think a lot of hippie culture actually started around Newport Beach with the original surfer scene. A lot of the surfers were really beatniks who had basically dropped out of society to smoke pot and ride waves. They had a lot of religious experiences doing that and formed some of the first communes by sharing cheap houses near the beach and turning them into surfer crash pads. John Griggs moved to Laguna Beach shortly after he dropped acid for the first time. He created "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love," which became the biggest LSD, marijuana and hash smuggling operation in North America for a few years. --Steven Hager, "Brotherhood of Eternal Love"
The Feds knew about the Brotherhood, but it took them years to penetrate the organization because they were so tight. They weren't just a smuggling organization, they were a religious movement. Much of what you see today at Rainbow Family Gatherings looks a lot like what was going on around Griggs at Laguna. Yet Griggs remains relatively unknown. http://hightimes.com/cancup/hager/6908?utm_source=rss_home&sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4da1f875738c0d35%2C0
It Was About Spirituality, Not Drugs, Man
I don't take the party favors anymore (for decades) because my creative vision never Turned Off, but I was there at Ground Zero when the West Coat Revolution began: Things were never the same for me after listening to The Fugs play "Aphrodite Mass." In SoCal the Doors of Perception had swung open and the doorstop slid into place. At first Hollywood wasn't yet accommodating youth culture. But there was a scene in Pasadena, centering around Euphoria Gallery and coffee house, the Pasadena Civic, Ice House, a popular radio station, second-hand stores and headshops. Rumor linked Owsley's lab to Euphoria.
The Rinky Dink coffee house, Dick Dale shows in Balboa and other beach attractions were the havens of youth culture. In 1962 Dale moved to the Pasadena Civic, playing surf guitar to overflow crowds. We'd already been through surf and folk cult movements, and were heading into the folkrock era. I was part of all three scenes, especially the Newport surf crowd. Anaheim and Disneyland were frequent playgrounds full of new clubs and good drugs. Extreme mobility and innumerable recreational outlets fueled a new lifestyle.
Hyper-hedonic
The hidden history of conservative Orange County is that it gave birth to a hyper-hedonistic cycle, fueled by economic boom. Suddenly, surfing and drugs went together. Surfboards carried contraband across borders in their hollowed out cores as freaks ranged the globe, seeking the Endless Summer. Headshops sprung up everywhere, some more infamous than others. Laguna Beach, which had gained fame as an art colony soon became notorious for other reasons. Social consciousness went Monterey Pop.
Probably no headshop was more notorious than MYSTIC ARTS WORLD, a front for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love at 670 So. Coast Hwy. Many towns established curfews to keep minors under control. Being young alone was "Probable cause". Laguna's "Mystic Arts World", a headshop on Pacific Coast Highway was established in 1967 by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. It burned down in a mysterious June 1970 fire considered by many to have been an act of arson carried out by local members of the right-wing John Birch Society.
I remember buying my first tarot deck in La Jolla, Ca., at the Mithras Bookstore/Unicorn Cinema (photo above), near the Self-Realization Fellowship surfing outpost, "Swamis." The floors and walls were papered with old kitchy newspapers and movie posters, shellacked into immortality. The Cinema was small and featured remarkable programming. It was eclectic in the extreme -- mixing foreign, Hollywood, experimental, short and silent films in nearly equal measure. The bookstore, which sold a highly personal selection of new and used books, was the entry to the cinema, and stayed open until the last film had concluded. As a consequence it had two lives. In the daytime it was a quiet bookstore, and in the evenings it pulsed with the life of the cinema. The theater tickets were dispensed from a counter in the store, and the cinema goers waited for the change of films while browsing the shelves.
Love, Forever Changes
But years before that I spent my formative years with the notorious Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), surviving initiation ordeals at The Church in Anaheim before the move to Laguna, the infamous "Dodge City" on Woodland Dr. where anything went, including Tim Leary. When I do the math, it turns out I was there at the inception, 1966.
Months after the holiday season, the great room at The Church was eerily decorated by an Xmas tree decorated with cigarette packages hung upside down from the ceiling by a noose...or, hey, was that a hallucination? Naw, don't think so. Then, there was the night some dork tried to commit suicide by downing, of all things in that setting, a whole bottle of Bayer aspirin. What a bummer to make some guy heave while you're high. Proximate sexual activity is too common to more than mention. The sexual revolution was in full swing. "Farmer" John Griggs became the originator of a cosmic hippie philosophy that still persists as a meme; it even took in Tim Leary for a year and a half. Later, BEL paid the Weather Underground to bust him out of Lompoc.
They were associated with the cult films, Endless Summer and Rainbow Bridge.
Nick Sand turned out to be the wizard behind the early scenes of BEL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXAKijc1Vmc&feature=related
ORANGE SUNSHINE
http://books.google.com/books?id=OmDd9XKZ6hoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=orange+sunshine&hl=en&ei=MYs8TrLwHYvSiALolozDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
In 1966 a biker gang [sic] from California, lead by “Farmer” John Griggs held up a Hollywood producer at gunpoint [sic] and stole his stash of Sandoz LSD. After taking the acid they appear to have experienced some sort of epiphany, and began to experiment with psychedelics and mysticism. In the summer of 1966, John Griggs travelled to Millbrook and met Timothy Leary who urged Griggs to form his own church.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, consisting of 30 original members was formally established in October 1966, 10 days after LSD was made illegal in California. The groups stated objective was: “to bring the world to a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Ghandi, and all true prophets and apostles of God, and to spread the love and wisdom of these great teachers to all men… We believe this church to be the earthly instrument of God’s Will. We believe in the sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him”.
As part of this new religion, LSD was used as a communal sacrament. To support the emerging religion they opened a shop, selling “hippie paraphernalia” in Laguna Beach, California. However the shop did not provide the necessary income for its intended purpose, which was to purchase land for the church.
Subsequently the Brotherhood started dealing drugs: Initially they smuggled Marijuana from Mexico, however over a few years they developed a smuggling and distribution network that reached to Afghanistan. They also sold LSD produced by Owsley in San Francisco.
In late 1967 Owsley was arrested and supplies of LSD dried up. The Brotherhood made contact with Owsley’s former assistant Tim Scully in 1968, along with another chemist, Nick Sand who had previously served as chemist to Arthur Kleps’ Neo-American BooHoo Church. By June 1969 Sand and Scully had produced an estimated 10 million doses of high quality LSD.
In the summer of 1969, at a rock concert in Anaheim a member of the Brotherhood appeared wearing a T-Shirt reading “Orange Sunshine Express” scattering pills of Sand and Scully’s LSD around him. “Orange Sunshine” was born. It is estimated that 100,000 doses of LSD were given away that day.
Orange Sunshine quickly reached mythical status: Timothy Leary (who had moved to the West Coast following the disintegration of the Millbrook community in 1967) endorsed Orange Sunshine over other brands of acid and gave public lectures on the theme of “Deal for Real: The Dealer as Robin Hood”, claiming that psychedelic drug users had an obligation to distribute drugs, to pay tribute to brotherhoods, or groups of men. It was said that Orange Sunshine was different to other LSD because of cosmic influences and special karma. It was put forward that it was not just selling drugs but enabling people’s existence and spiritual development.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s Orange Sunshine spread worldwide, reaching Goa, Nepal, Indonesia, Vietnam, Israel and Mecca. The Brotherhood had developed a reputation as spiritual crusaders.
However by the summer of 1969 cracks were starting to appear: Griggs died after an overdose and a teenage friend of Timothy Leary’s daughter was found drowned in a pond at the Brotherhood commune with traces of LSD in her system. Members of the Brotherhood were jailed on marijuana charges. After Griggs’ death the approach to distribution became more competitive and less focused on the founding sentiments of the church. Additionally, the supply of Orange Sunshine LSD was dwindling and they had lost their contacts for raw materials.
Scully left the Brotherhood in 1969, shortly after a man named Ronald Stark appeared at the Brotherhood Ranch. Stark became the Brotherhoods chemist, producing an estimated 20kg of LSD between 1969 and 1971. He also subsequently became its banker, channelling money through a bank which had originally been set up by the CIA, as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations. Stark was a mysterious figure, with worldwide contacts, he claimed to know spies and was suspected of being involved with the CIA (and the project later to be revealed as MK-ULTRA). In 1971 he shut down his European LSD manufacturing operation, having claimed to have been “tipped off”.
In 1972 the Brotherhood was busted, and Stark ended up with most of the Brotherhood’s property and money in his name. This was shortly after The Weathermen aided Timothy Leary in his escape from jail (with funds provided by the Brotherhood).
Stark was jailed in Italy in 1975, and received several visitors from the US and British consulates. He was freed in 1979.
For further info: “Acid Dreams: the Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond” Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain.
ACID DREAMS
http://books.google.com/books?id=_oq8djFLFL0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=acid+dreams&hl=en&ei=YIk8TpOnEqvRiAL83pDDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
ENDLESS SUMMER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw7xBwBWaT8&feature=related
Ever see the movie "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World?" My favorite character is the lifeguard from California. You first see him dancing with his beatnik girlfriend in his beach pad. That movie was made in 1962, right before the hippies arrived on the scene. But you can recognize their precursers in those beach party beatniks. I think a lot of hippie culture actually started around Newport Beach with the original surfer scene. A lot of the surfers were really beatniks who had basically dropped out of society to smoke pot and ride waves. They had a lot of religious experiences doing that and formed some of the first communes by sharing cheap houses near the beach and turning them into surfer crash pads. John Griggs moved to Laguna Beach shortly after he dropped acid for the first time. He created "The Brotherhood of Eternal Love," which became the biggest LSD, marijuana and hash smuggling operation in North America for a few years. --Steven Hager, "Brotherhood of Eternal Love"
The Feds knew about the Brotherhood, but it took them years to penetrate the organization because they were so tight. They weren't just a smuggling organization, they were a religious movement. Much of what you see today at Rainbow Family Gatherings looks a lot like what was going on around Griggs at Laguna. Yet Griggs remains relatively unknown. http://hightimes.com/cancup/hager/6908?utm_source=rss_home&sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4da1f875738c0d35%2C0
It Was About Spirituality, Not Drugs, Man
I don't take the party favors anymore (for decades) because my creative vision never Turned Off, but I was there at Ground Zero when the West Coat Revolution began: Things were never the same for me after listening to The Fugs play "Aphrodite Mass." In SoCal the Doors of Perception had swung open and the doorstop slid into place. At first Hollywood wasn't yet accommodating youth culture. But there was a scene in Pasadena, centering around Euphoria Gallery and coffee house, the Pasadena Civic, Ice House, a popular radio station, second-hand stores and headshops. Rumor linked Owsley's lab to Euphoria.
The Rinky Dink coffee house, Dick Dale shows in Balboa and other beach attractions were the havens of youth culture. In 1962 Dale moved to the Pasadena Civic, playing surf guitar to overflow crowds. We'd already been through surf and folk cult movements, and were heading into the folkrock era. I was part of all three scenes, especially the Newport surf crowd. Anaheim and Disneyland were frequent playgrounds full of new clubs and good drugs. Extreme mobility and innumerable recreational outlets fueled a new lifestyle.
Hyper-hedonic
The hidden history of conservative Orange County is that it gave birth to a hyper-hedonistic cycle, fueled by economic boom. Suddenly, surfing and drugs went together. Surfboards carried contraband across borders in their hollowed out cores as freaks ranged the globe, seeking the Endless Summer. Headshops sprung up everywhere, some more infamous than others. Laguna Beach, which had gained fame as an art colony soon became notorious for other reasons. Social consciousness went Monterey Pop.
Probably no headshop was more notorious than MYSTIC ARTS WORLD, a front for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love at 670 So. Coast Hwy. Many towns established curfews to keep minors under control. Being young alone was "Probable cause". Laguna's "Mystic Arts World", a headshop on Pacific Coast Highway was established in 1967 by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. It burned down in a mysterious June 1970 fire considered by many to have been an act of arson carried out by local members of the right-wing John Birch Society.
I remember buying my first tarot deck in La Jolla, Ca., at the Mithras Bookstore/Unicorn Cinema (photo above), near the Self-Realization Fellowship surfing outpost, "Swamis." The floors and walls were papered with old kitchy newspapers and movie posters, shellacked into immortality. The Cinema was small and featured remarkable programming. It was eclectic in the extreme -- mixing foreign, Hollywood, experimental, short and silent films in nearly equal measure. The bookstore, which sold a highly personal selection of new and used books, was the entry to the cinema, and stayed open until the last film had concluded. As a consequence it had two lives. In the daytime it was a quiet bookstore, and in the evenings it pulsed with the life of the cinema. The theater tickets were dispensed from a counter in the store, and the cinema goers waited for the change of films while browsing the shelves.
Love, Forever Changes
But years before that I spent my formative years with the notorious Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), surviving initiation ordeals at The Church in Anaheim before the move to Laguna, the infamous "Dodge City" on Woodland Dr. where anything went, including Tim Leary. When I do the math, it turns out I was there at the inception, 1966.
Months after the holiday season, the great room at The Church was eerily decorated by an Xmas tree decorated with cigarette packages hung upside down from the ceiling by a noose...or, hey, was that a hallucination? Naw, don't think so. Then, there was the night some dork tried to commit suicide by downing, of all things in that setting, a whole bottle of Bayer aspirin. What a bummer to make some guy heave while you're high. Proximate sexual activity is too common to more than mention. The sexual revolution was in full swing. "Farmer" John Griggs became the originator of a cosmic hippie philosophy that still persists as a meme; it even took in Tim Leary for a year and a half. Later, BEL paid the Weather Underground to bust him out of Lompoc.
They were associated with the cult films, Endless Summer and Rainbow Bridge.
Nick Sand turned out to be the wizard behind the early scenes of BEL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXAKijc1Vmc&feature=related
ORANGE SUNSHINE
http://books.google.com/books?id=OmDd9XKZ6hoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=orange+sunshine&hl=en&ei=MYs8TrLwHYvSiALolozDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
In 1966 a biker gang [sic] from California, lead by “Farmer” John Griggs held up a Hollywood producer at gunpoint [sic] and stole his stash of Sandoz LSD. After taking the acid they appear to have experienced some sort of epiphany, and began to experiment with psychedelics and mysticism. In the summer of 1966, John Griggs travelled to Millbrook and met Timothy Leary who urged Griggs to form his own church.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, consisting of 30 original members was formally established in October 1966, 10 days after LSD was made illegal in California. The groups stated objective was: “to bring the world to a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Ramakrishna, Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Ghandi, and all true prophets and apostles of God, and to spread the love and wisdom of these great teachers to all men… We believe this church to be the earthly instrument of God’s Will. We believe in the sacred right of each individual to commune with God in spirit and in truth as it is empirically revealed to him”.
As part of this new religion, LSD was used as a communal sacrament. To support the emerging religion they opened a shop, selling “hippie paraphernalia” in Laguna Beach, California. However the shop did not provide the necessary income for its intended purpose, which was to purchase land for the church.
Subsequently the Brotherhood started dealing drugs: Initially they smuggled Marijuana from Mexico, however over a few years they developed a smuggling and distribution network that reached to Afghanistan. They also sold LSD produced by Owsley in San Francisco.
In late 1967 Owsley was arrested and supplies of LSD dried up. The Brotherhood made contact with Owsley’s former assistant Tim Scully in 1968, along with another chemist, Nick Sand who had previously served as chemist to Arthur Kleps’ Neo-American BooHoo Church. By June 1969 Sand and Scully had produced an estimated 10 million doses of high quality LSD.
In the summer of 1969, at a rock concert in Anaheim a member of the Brotherhood appeared wearing a T-Shirt reading “Orange Sunshine Express” scattering pills of Sand and Scully’s LSD around him. “Orange Sunshine” was born. It is estimated that 100,000 doses of LSD were given away that day.
Orange Sunshine quickly reached mythical status: Timothy Leary (who had moved to the West Coast following the disintegration of the Millbrook community in 1967) endorsed Orange Sunshine over other brands of acid and gave public lectures on the theme of “Deal for Real: The Dealer as Robin Hood”, claiming that psychedelic drug users had an obligation to distribute drugs, to pay tribute to brotherhoods, or groups of men. It was said that Orange Sunshine was different to other LSD because of cosmic influences and special karma. It was put forward that it was not just selling drugs but enabling people’s existence and spiritual development.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s Orange Sunshine spread worldwide, reaching Goa, Nepal, Indonesia, Vietnam, Israel and Mecca. The Brotherhood had developed a reputation as spiritual crusaders.
However by the summer of 1969 cracks were starting to appear: Griggs died after an overdose and a teenage friend of Timothy Leary’s daughter was found drowned in a pond at the Brotherhood commune with traces of LSD in her system. Members of the Brotherhood were jailed on marijuana charges. After Griggs’ death the approach to distribution became more competitive and less focused on the founding sentiments of the church. Additionally, the supply of Orange Sunshine LSD was dwindling and they had lost their contacts for raw materials.
Scully left the Brotherhood in 1969, shortly after a man named Ronald Stark appeared at the Brotherhood Ranch. Stark became the Brotherhoods chemist, producing an estimated 20kg of LSD between 1969 and 1971. He also subsequently became its banker, channelling money through a bank which had originally been set up by the CIA, as a front for covert narcotics and money laundering operations. Stark was a mysterious figure, with worldwide contacts, he claimed to know spies and was suspected of being involved with the CIA (and the project later to be revealed as MK-ULTRA). In 1971 he shut down his European LSD manufacturing operation, having claimed to have been “tipped off”.
In 1972 the Brotherhood was busted, and Stark ended up with most of the Brotherhood’s property and money in his name. This was shortly after The Weathermen aided Timothy Leary in his escape from jail (with funds provided by the Brotherhood).
Stark was jailed in Italy in 1975, and received several visitors from the US and British consulates. He was freed in 1979.
For further info: “Acid Dreams: the Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond” Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain.
ACID DREAMS
http://books.google.com/books?id=_oq8djFLFL0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=acid+dreams&hl=en&ei=YIk8TpOnEqvRiAL83pDDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
ENDLESS SUMMER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw7xBwBWaT8&feature=related
Review
Orange Sunshine by Nicholas Schou Publisher:
Thomas Dunne Books Year:2010 ISBN:0312551835 Categories:Book Reviews Reviewed by Jonathan Taylor, 9/1/2010
Once upon a time there were hippies in Orange County, California.
To someone like myself who has lived in this ostensibly conservative region for some time, this might already seem like a fairytale. How much more so then to realize that these OC hippies worshipped LSD as a sacrament, distributed unbelievably massive quantities of it, pioneered smuggling hash out of Afghanistan while forming an enormous hash and weed distribution business, counted Timothy Leary as one of their own for a few years and bankrolled his prison breakout by the Weathermen, and were eventually prosecuted out of business by Orange County cops?
The "hippie mafia" in question was the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and the latest (and by my count only the second) major book to tell their story is Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World by OC Weekly investigative reporter Nick Schou. This non-fiction account reads like a late 60s crime thriller, though the crimes in question seem mainly to be quenching an enormous thirst for weed, hash and acid among the young recreational drug-using subcultures of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Though true, it is an amazing tale, especially in Schou's telling. Schou gets this scene, the humor of it, the foibles, and the sheer legendary stonedness. He also stresses the anecdotal and personal over the larger context, unlike an earlier account of the Brotherhood by Tendler and May. That book, engaging and informative, focused more broadly on LSD in both its cultural milieu and also its main manufacturers. Orange Sunshine focuses almost exclusively on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love itself, with a major exploration of their hash smuggling exploits. Thus the title is a bit of a misnomer.
The Brotherhood was initially a group of violent thugs from the flatlands of Orange County and LA, some of whom were also surfers, who got religion in the form of LSD. Utopian in orientation but street dealers in practice, they figured out how to make a bunch of money from smuggling and distributing their favorite drugs. They didn't, apparently, ever quite learn how to not bring their work home with them and the tale of their success and dissolution almost seems to suggest that smuggling drugs was the easy part, while just existing while being on so many drugs all the time was tougher. Eventually, carelessness, misadventure, bad luck, and snitches put an end to the Brotherhood. The LSD manufacturing and hash smuggling continued, but that's another story.
Orange Sunshine mixes together great huge swaths of seemingly disparate Southern California culture. Mean flatland thugs, crazed canyon bikers, stoned coastal surfers, pan-Californian acidheads: the Brotherhood is where these subcultural strands came together. Always seeking a utopian escape, some of its members fled to Maui, where these transplanted pot smugglers turned to big-wave surfing, created Maui Waui, and appeared in the film Rainbow Bridge with Jimi Hendrix, whom they dosed with a DMT-laced joint during his performance. In the great tradition of the Southern Cal/Northern Cal rivalry, the Brotherhood seems simultaneously more heroic, hedonistic, and moronic than the Haight crowd, whom they happily sold weed to and bought Owsley acid from. One of their few NorCal appearances was showing up to dose the Hell's Angels with acid at Altamont. Sadly, the Brotherhood seemed to have no "house band" counterpart like the Bay Area's Grateful Dead (one hesitates to guess what this would have sounded like), but its members did include the former drummer of Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. (Dale, the most influential guitarist in the history of surf music, was based in Orange County.)
Schou has a great, almost pulp-entertainment way of telling this story and seems to have put in abundant time interviewing participants of the scene, and the larger-than-life characters he describes come bursting off the page. Most notable is John Griggs, a mean son-of-a-bitch 50s-style jock who changed dramatically after sampling LSD stolen at gunpoint from a Hollywood producer. He became a sort of LSD visionary, leading the Brothers from their criminal ways to, well, way more stoned and peaceful but still criminal ways. Eventually he decided to drop out and formed a communal ranch group in the mountains near Idyllwild, California. It was here that he tragically died of what was reported by onlookers to be an overdose of "synthetic psilocybin" (see Afterword). This sort of horrible comeuppance seemed to be the fate of more than a few of the elite members of the Brotherhood, with accidental deaths, overdoses (including those of children), and busts far too common, though few of the Brotherhood ever served serious time.
But this is not really a cautionary tale, it's an adventure story, and a ripping one at that. The moral of the story, if there is one, is "Wow, it sure would have been fun to live in Laguna Beach in the 60s!"* It nicely complements other accounts of the cultural history of acid in the 60s such as Storming Heaven and Acid Dreams. Read those for the insightful discussions of the major political shifts and cultural changes of that singular and incredible era, as well as for the equally incredible story of the CIA's engagement with acid. But read Orange Sunshine for the kicks.
*Actually I did live in Laguna Beach from '66 to '67, but I was two years old and my parents moved our family, in part, to get away from the drugged-out hippies.
Afterword:
Unfortunately, I find it necessary to write an afterword, as this book is attracting some controversy from within the psychedelic community. The main charge is that the book is error-ridden and inaccurate, the reason being that key participants were not interviewed and some of those who were may have had their own vested interests in providing misleading information. Nick Schou has told me that he made every effort to interview key protagonists including, for example, Nick Sand, who declined several interview requests. Others who denied requests remain anonymous. At the same time, I feel it necessary to point out that Schou did interview a lot of former members of the Brotherhood as well as their family or other hangers-on, thus while it is certainly possible that the book contains some errors, distortions, or omissions, it is impossible to dismiss it as being poorly researched. It clearly and obviously isn't.
A couple of issues remain. First, there are questions about whether John Griggs really died of an overdose of synthetic psilocybin. I've asked Schou and he replied:
"Yes this question always comes up every time someone mentions Griggs' death. Although it's not in the book since I only talked to [Brenice] Brennie Smith after I turned in the manuscript, he was there the night Griggs died and confirms that he died of a toxic reaction to a crystallized form of psilocybin as stated in my book. Who knows what else was mixed in with it, but by all accounts, it was poisonous in the extreme in so far as Griggs ingested far too much of it, according to Smith as well as other Brotherhood members who weren't there but got that story straight from those who were present. Nobody I interviewed for the book who was in the Brotherhood and on the scene when he died have any confusion that this is how he died. It was widely known among the Brotherhood that this psilocybin was making the rounds, see where I mention Ed Padilla mentioning Griggs' enthusiasm for the stuff the last time he saw Griggs. Some speculate that Griggs choked on his own vomit on the way to the hospital, but Smith says this is not the case and backs up the version in my book."
Schou also enclosed a death certificate, which listed Griggs' death as a consequence of "suspected drug intoxication (psilocin)". This is one of the few known deaths claimed to be caused by an overdose of psilocybin/psilocin. Given that no other fatal ODs from synthetic psilocybin or psilocin have ever been reported, it is possible that this was actually something else, or that the psilocybin was contaminated or adulterated.
Another question is more serious. In October 2009, Schou wrote a story for the OC Weekly on former Brotherhood member Brennie Smith, who had arrived in California in part to be interviewed for a documentary on the Brotherhood, and was arrested on an outstanding warrant.1 Apparently there is suspicion in some quarters that Schou's publicity of the Brotherhood from his prior OC Weekly stories on the group led to law enforcement's previously dormant interest in Smith, or that Smith arrived at Schou's behest. Schou insists that he had no knowledge of Smith's visit until he arrived, and in fact he gathered information helpful to Smith and shared it with Smith's defense attorney. Schou's stance on the ludicrousness of arresting and charging Smith is evident in the follow-up he penned later in October 2009.2 Given Schou's record of articles and investigative news reporting critical of the War on Drugs and the generally critical bent of the OC Weekly on Orange County law enforcement, the allegation that Schou somehow contributed to Smith's arrest seems baseless.
Clearly, those who were there and participated are in the best position to evaluate Orange Sunshine's accuracy, but given the complexity of the Brotherhood, its changes over time, the number of now elderly interviewees Schou talked to, and the fluid nature of memory, this is probably about the best account of a bunch of drug smugglers from 40 years ago that we're likely to get.
----
1) Schou N. "Was Brotherhood Member Brenice Lee Smith a Felonious Monk?". OC Weekly. Oct 22, 2009.
2) Schou N. "Why is Brenice Lee Smith Still Behind Bars, Awaiting Trial?". OC Weekly. Oct 28, 2009.
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'Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World' by Nicholas Schou
BOOK REVIEW An OC Weekly writer reveals the dark side of the 1960s drug culture by tracking down members and associates of the Orange County counterculture group, who spoke of it for the first time in decades.
March 24, 2010|By Erik Himmelsbach
In the 1960s, a group of psychedelic-loving misfits from Orange County called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love figured it could turn the entire world on to the mystical power of LSD.
It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time -- the brotherhood had been founded on a shared belief in LSD's transformative effects. But somewhere along the line, the spiritual message was squashed by thousands of kilos of smuggled marijuana and hashish.
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.
Griggs, Schou writes, "would recruit everyone he knew -- surfers, street fighters, pot dealers and petty crooks -- into a tribe of people who viewed acid as a sacrament, a window into God itself."
This loose but growing aggregation officially became the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in October 1966. Their utopian agenda, aside from turning on the world, involved a scenario in which the group would relocate to its own island.
But such grandiose dreams didn't come cheap. Although they opened a storefront called Mystic Arts World on Pacific Coast Highway, drugs were always the primary source of the brotherhood's solvency.
In 1967, Griggs consulted the I Ching for advice about sending some brothers to the Middle East to score hash. "The book said, 'Crossing the great water will bring supreme success,' " brotherhood member Travis Ashbrook recalls.
But while brotherhood members were shipping hash-filled cars back to the States, Griggs developed a bond with Leary -- who'd moved to Orange County at his suggestion -- that was tearing the group apart.
Many in the brotherhood distrusted Leary, Schou writes. To them, the acid guru was a charlatan, addicted to fame and willing to glom on to anyone willing to help promote his great cause: himself.
The entry of the high-profile Leary into the organization was accompanied by increased scrutiny from law enforcement, which prompted many members to flee California for Maui.
Filling the void were nefarious characters more interested in money and fear than peace and love. The name of the brotherhood, Schou notes, "now was being hijacked by dope pushers and used as a sales pitch or a marketing device."
After Griggs died in 1969 of a drug overdose, the group lost its tenuous bond. Business became more ruthless. The drugs got heavier. Mistakes were made, and, in 1971, the police finally brought them down. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was left to rest in peace.
That is, until now. With "Orange Sunshine," Schou has crafted a definitive history of the dark side of the 1960s. It's a jarring but important reminder that the black-and-white filter that many of us bring to the decade is really shot through with gray.
Himmelsbach is a Los Angeles writer and producer.
Thomas Dunne Books Year:2010 ISBN:0312551835 Categories:Book Reviews Reviewed by Jonathan Taylor, 9/1/2010
Once upon a time there were hippies in Orange County, California.
To someone like myself who has lived in this ostensibly conservative region for some time, this might already seem like a fairytale. How much more so then to realize that these OC hippies worshipped LSD as a sacrament, distributed unbelievably massive quantities of it, pioneered smuggling hash out of Afghanistan while forming an enormous hash and weed distribution business, counted Timothy Leary as one of their own for a few years and bankrolled his prison breakout by the Weathermen, and were eventually prosecuted out of business by Orange County cops?
The "hippie mafia" in question was the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and the latest (and by my count only the second) major book to tell their story is Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World by OC Weekly investigative reporter Nick Schou. This non-fiction account reads like a late 60s crime thriller, though the crimes in question seem mainly to be quenching an enormous thirst for weed, hash and acid among the young recreational drug-using subcultures of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Though true, it is an amazing tale, especially in Schou's telling. Schou gets this scene, the humor of it, the foibles, and the sheer legendary stonedness. He also stresses the anecdotal and personal over the larger context, unlike an earlier account of the Brotherhood by Tendler and May. That book, engaging and informative, focused more broadly on LSD in both its cultural milieu and also its main manufacturers. Orange Sunshine focuses almost exclusively on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love itself, with a major exploration of their hash smuggling exploits. Thus the title is a bit of a misnomer.
The Brotherhood was initially a group of violent thugs from the flatlands of Orange County and LA, some of whom were also surfers, who got religion in the form of LSD. Utopian in orientation but street dealers in practice, they figured out how to make a bunch of money from smuggling and distributing their favorite drugs. They didn't, apparently, ever quite learn how to not bring their work home with them and the tale of their success and dissolution almost seems to suggest that smuggling drugs was the easy part, while just existing while being on so many drugs all the time was tougher. Eventually, carelessness, misadventure, bad luck, and snitches put an end to the Brotherhood. The LSD manufacturing and hash smuggling continued, but that's another story.
Orange Sunshine mixes together great huge swaths of seemingly disparate Southern California culture. Mean flatland thugs, crazed canyon bikers, stoned coastal surfers, pan-Californian acidheads: the Brotherhood is where these subcultural strands came together. Always seeking a utopian escape, some of its members fled to Maui, where these transplanted pot smugglers turned to big-wave surfing, created Maui Waui, and appeared in the film Rainbow Bridge with Jimi Hendrix, whom they dosed with a DMT-laced joint during his performance. In the great tradition of the Southern Cal/Northern Cal rivalry, the Brotherhood seems simultaneously more heroic, hedonistic, and moronic than the Haight crowd, whom they happily sold weed to and bought Owsley acid from. One of their few NorCal appearances was showing up to dose the Hell's Angels with acid at Altamont. Sadly, the Brotherhood seemed to have no "house band" counterpart like the Bay Area's Grateful Dead (one hesitates to guess what this would have sounded like), but its members did include the former drummer of Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. (Dale, the most influential guitarist in the history of surf music, was based in Orange County.)
Schou has a great, almost pulp-entertainment way of telling this story and seems to have put in abundant time interviewing participants of the scene, and the larger-than-life characters he describes come bursting off the page. Most notable is John Griggs, a mean son-of-a-bitch 50s-style jock who changed dramatically after sampling LSD stolen at gunpoint from a Hollywood producer. He became a sort of LSD visionary, leading the Brothers from their criminal ways to, well, way more stoned and peaceful but still criminal ways. Eventually he decided to drop out and formed a communal ranch group in the mountains near Idyllwild, California. It was here that he tragically died of what was reported by onlookers to be an overdose of "synthetic psilocybin" (see Afterword). This sort of horrible comeuppance seemed to be the fate of more than a few of the elite members of the Brotherhood, with accidental deaths, overdoses (including those of children), and busts far too common, though few of the Brotherhood ever served serious time.
But this is not really a cautionary tale, it's an adventure story, and a ripping one at that. The moral of the story, if there is one, is "Wow, it sure would have been fun to live in Laguna Beach in the 60s!"* It nicely complements other accounts of the cultural history of acid in the 60s such as Storming Heaven and Acid Dreams. Read those for the insightful discussions of the major political shifts and cultural changes of that singular and incredible era, as well as for the equally incredible story of the CIA's engagement with acid. But read Orange Sunshine for the kicks.
*Actually I did live in Laguna Beach from '66 to '67, but I was two years old and my parents moved our family, in part, to get away from the drugged-out hippies.
Afterword:
Unfortunately, I find it necessary to write an afterword, as this book is attracting some controversy from within the psychedelic community. The main charge is that the book is error-ridden and inaccurate, the reason being that key participants were not interviewed and some of those who were may have had their own vested interests in providing misleading information. Nick Schou has told me that he made every effort to interview key protagonists including, for example, Nick Sand, who declined several interview requests. Others who denied requests remain anonymous. At the same time, I feel it necessary to point out that Schou did interview a lot of former members of the Brotherhood as well as their family or other hangers-on, thus while it is certainly possible that the book contains some errors, distortions, or omissions, it is impossible to dismiss it as being poorly researched. It clearly and obviously isn't.
A couple of issues remain. First, there are questions about whether John Griggs really died of an overdose of synthetic psilocybin. I've asked Schou and he replied:
"Yes this question always comes up every time someone mentions Griggs' death. Although it's not in the book since I only talked to [Brenice] Brennie Smith after I turned in the manuscript, he was there the night Griggs died and confirms that he died of a toxic reaction to a crystallized form of psilocybin as stated in my book. Who knows what else was mixed in with it, but by all accounts, it was poisonous in the extreme in so far as Griggs ingested far too much of it, according to Smith as well as other Brotherhood members who weren't there but got that story straight from those who were present. Nobody I interviewed for the book who was in the Brotherhood and on the scene when he died have any confusion that this is how he died. It was widely known among the Brotherhood that this psilocybin was making the rounds, see where I mention Ed Padilla mentioning Griggs' enthusiasm for the stuff the last time he saw Griggs. Some speculate that Griggs choked on his own vomit on the way to the hospital, but Smith says this is not the case and backs up the version in my book."
Schou also enclosed a death certificate, which listed Griggs' death as a consequence of "suspected drug intoxication (psilocin)". This is one of the few known deaths claimed to be caused by an overdose of psilocybin/psilocin. Given that no other fatal ODs from synthetic psilocybin or psilocin have ever been reported, it is possible that this was actually something else, or that the psilocybin was contaminated or adulterated.
Another question is more serious. In October 2009, Schou wrote a story for the OC Weekly on former Brotherhood member Brennie Smith, who had arrived in California in part to be interviewed for a documentary on the Brotherhood, and was arrested on an outstanding warrant.1 Apparently there is suspicion in some quarters that Schou's publicity of the Brotherhood from his prior OC Weekly stories on the group led to law enforcement's previously dormant interest in Smith, or that Smith arrived at Schou's behest. Schou insists that he had no knowledge of Smith's visit until he arrived, and in fact he gathered information helpful to Smith and shared it with Smith's defense attorney. Schou's stance on the ludicrousness of arresting and charging Smith is evident in the follow-up he penned later in October 2009.2 Given Schou's record of articles and investigative news reporting critical of the War on Drugs and the generally critical bent of the OC Weekly on Orange County law enforcement, the allegation that Schou somehow contributed to Smith's arrest seems baseless.
Clearly, those who were there and participated are in the best position to evaluate Orange Sunshine's accuracy, but given the complexity of the Brotherhood, its changes over time, the number of now elderly interviewees Schou talked to, and the fluid nature of memory, this is probably about the best account of a bunch of drug smugglers from 40 years ago that we're likely to get.
----
1) Schou N. "Was Brotherhood Member Brenice Lee Smith a Felonious Monk?". OC Weekly. Oct 22, 2009.
2) Schou N. "Why is Brenice Lee Smith Still Behind Bars, Awaiting Trial?". OC Weekly. Oct 28, 2009.
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'Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World' by Nicholas Schou
BOOK REVIEW An OC Weekly writer reveals the dark side of the 1960s drug culture by tracking down members and associates of the Orange County counterculture group, who spoke of it for the first time in decades.
March 24, 2010|By Erik Himmelsbach
In the 1960s, a group of psychedelic-loving misfits from Orange County called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love figured it could turn the entire world on to the mystical power of LSD.
It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time -- the brotherhood had been founded on a shared belief in LSD's transformative effects. But somewhere along the line, the spiritual message was squashed by thousands of kilos of smuggled marijuana and hashish.
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.
Griggs, Schou writes, "would recruit everyone he knew -- surfers, street fighters, pot dealers and petty crooks -- into a tribe of people who viewed acid as a sacrament, a window into God itself."
This loose but growing aggregation officially became the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in October 1966. Their utopian agenda, aside from turning on the world, involved a scenario in which the group would relocate to its own island.
But such grandiose dreams didn't come cheap. Although they opened a storefront called Mystic Arts World on Pacific Coast Highway, drugs were always the primary source of the brotherhood's solvency.
In 1967, Griggs consulted the I Ching for advice about sending some brothers to the Middle East to score hash. "The book said, 'Crossing the great water will bring supreme success,' " brotherhood member Travis Ashbrook recalls.
But while brotherhood members were shipping hash-filled cars back to the States, Griggs developed a bond with Leary -- who'd moved to Orange County at his suggestion -- that was tearing the group apart.
Many in the brotherhood distrusted Leary, Schou writes. To them, the acid guru was a charlatan, addicted to fame and willing to glom on to anyone willing to help promote his great cause: himself.
The entry of the high-profile Leary into the organization was accompanied by increased scrutiny from law enforcement, which prompted many members to flee California for Maui.
Filling the void were nefarious characters more interested in money and fear than peace and love. The name of the brotherhood, Schou notes, "now was being hijacked by dope pushers and used as a sales pitch or a marketing device."
After Griggs died in 1969 of a drug overdose, the group lost its tenuous bond. Business became more ruthless. The drugs got heavier. Mistakes were made, and, in 1971, the police finally brought them down. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was left to rest in peace.
That is, until now. With "Orange Sunshine," Schou has crafted a definitive history of the dark side of the 1960s. It's a jarring but important reminder that the black-and-white filter that many of us bring to the decade is really shot through with gray.
Himmelsbach is a Los Angeles writer and producer.
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1339261
Ronald Hadley Stark was perhaps the largest source of American LSD in the late 1960s after Owsley Stanley's imprisonment in 1967.
Stark arrived in the spring of 1969 at the Laguna Beach, California home of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a collective and LSD dealership. Previously unknown to the Brotherhood, he was quickly welcomed when he proffered a kilogram of pure LSD (equivalent to 5 million 200-microgram doses), or so the story goes. What makes this particularly interesting is that there had never been that much LSD produced commercially (by Sandoz Laboratories, the only commercially manufacturer of the drug); there would be little reason for a legitimate laboratory to produce so much and less reason for an illegal operation to produce so much at once. If the story is true, it means that whoever produced the acid intended it for a large number of people and was unconcerned about prosecution. The standard operating procedure for any illegal drug lab is to produce only somewhat more than satisfies immediate demand, for obvious reasons.
The Brotherhood distributed a form of acid known as "Orange Sunshine," which had a reputation of having more unpleasant side-effects than Owsley's product had. Users had a greater incidence of symptoms akin to strychnine poisoning as well as more of a "speedy" feeling to their trips. In the words of Michael Hollinshead (the man who originally turned Leary on):
There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was – the so-called "street acid" - came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave me "Sandoz" or "crystal" acid... My evaluation had nothing to do with the notion that a wholly synthetic drug produced a wholly synthetic experience - the intellectual response - but was based on direct, first-hand experience (about 30 trips with street acid in all). And in each session I felt that there was something it lacked - it was too "electric," too "speedy" and too "mind-shattering." The earlier clarity of "insight" which I had obtained via the Sandoz acid was replaced by confusion, brokenness, words and worlds thrown into absolute dismemberment, or even absolute chaos, though, I must add, often coupled with a feeling that I can only describe as "sublime inflation," a super abundance of emotive energy, but it could not signify more a passionate flame and less the life-giving sun. Ronald Stark was also, allegedly, either a CIA agent or a free agent temporarily in the CIA's employ. Evidence of this came to light when he was arrested in Bologna, Italy for drug trafficking in 1975. Magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered that he be released on the grounds that he was a CIA agent (and had been since 1960). Floridia's evidence was circumstantial, but nonetheless interesting. While imprisoned, Stark was frequently visited by Wendy M. Hansen, from the U.S. consulate in Florence. The police had seized letters to Stark addressed to one of his illegal laboratories in Brussels from Charles C. Adams at the U.S. Embassy in London. Floridia also claimed that Stark had done secret work for the U.S. Defense Department from 1960 to 1962, and that there had been "periodic payments to him from Fort Lee, known to be the site of a CIA office." In 1984 a report was issued by an Italian parliamentary commission to study terrorism in Italy. The report concluded that Stark had been an adventurer who had been employed by the CIA, though it was not specified during what period.
Stark himself made several references to his association to the CIA, though nobody has quoted him as ever saying he worked for them directly. He claimed that he ended his relationship to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and moved operations to Brussels thanks to a CIA tip. He also claimed to have plans to supply LSD to CIA-backed Tibetan guerrillas resisting the Chinese occupation.
There is clearly some possibility the CIA had reason to desire control of the LSD supply in California. Their MKULTRA program had been researching the possibilities of using the drug for mind control purposes since well before recreational use became popular, and had discussed the research potential of an entire community on acid (e.g. the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco). The evidence that they did in fact, conspire to distribute underground LSD, or that Ronald Stark was involved, is tenuous at best, but is certainly worth looking at. In the words of Carl Oglesby, former head of Students for a Democratic Society:
What we have to contemplate nevertheless is the possibility that the great American acid trip, no matter how distinctive of the rebellion of the 1960s it came to appear, was in fact the result of a despicable government conspiracy.... If U.S. intelligence bodies collaborated in an effort to drug an entire generation of Americans, then the reason they did so was to disorient it, sedate it and de-politicize it.
Stark arrived in the spring of 1969 at the Laguna Beach, California home of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a collective and LSD dealership. Previously unknown to the Brotherhood, he was quickly welcomed when he proffered a kilogram of pure LSD (equivalent to 5 million 200-microgram doses), or so the story goes. What makes this particularly interesting is that there had never been that much LSD produced commercially (by Sandoz Laboratories, the only commercially manufacturer of the drug); there would be little reason for a legitimate laboratory to produce so much and less reason for an illegal operation to produce so much at once. If the story is true, it means that whoever produced the acid intended it for a large number of people and was unconcerned about prosecution. The standard operating procedure for any illegal drug lab is to produce only somewhat more than satisfies immediate demand, for obvious reasons.
The Brotherhood distributed a form of acid known as "Orange Sunshine," which had a reputation of having more unpleasant side-effects than Owsley's product had. Users had a greater incidence of symptoms akin to strychnine poisoning as well as more of a "speedy" feeling to their trips. In the words of Michael Hollinshead (the man who originally turned Leary on):
There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was – the so-called "street acid" - came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave me "Sandoz" or "crystal" acid... My evaluation had nothing to do with the notion that a wholly synthetic drug produced a wholly synthetic experience - the intellectual response - but was based on direct, first-hand experience (about 30 trips with street acid in all). And in each session I felt that there was something it lacked - it was too "electric," too "speedy" and too "mind-shattering." The earlier clarity of "insight" which I had obtained via the Sandoz acid was replaced by confusion, brokenness, words and worlds thrown into absolute dismemberment, or even absolute chaos, though, I must add, often coupled with a feeling that I can only describe as "sublime inflation," a super abundance of emotive energy, but it could not signify more a passionate flame and less the life-giving sun. Ronald Stark was also, allegedly, either a CIA agent or a free agent temporarily in the CIA's employ. Evidence of this came to light when he was arrested in Bologna, Italy for drug trafficking in 1975. Magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered that he be released on the grounds that he was a CIA agent (and had been since 1960). Floridia's evidence was circumstantial, but nonetheless interesting. While imprisoned, Stark was frequently visited by Wendy M. Hansen, from the U.S. consulate in Florence. The police had seized letters to Stark addressed to one of his illegal laboratories in Brussels from Charles C. Adams at the U.S. Embassy in London. Floridia also claimed that Stark had done secret work for the U.S. Defense Department from 1960 to 1962, and that there had been "periodic payments to him from Fort Lee, known to be the site of a CIA office." In 1984 a report was issued by an Italian parliamentary commission to study terrorism in Italy. The report concluded that Stark had been an adventurer who had been employed by the CIA, though it was not specified during what period.
Stark himself made several references to his association to the CIA, though nobody has quoted him as ever saying he worked for them directly. He claimed that he ended his relationship to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and moved operations to Brussels thanks to a CIA tip. He also claimed to have plans to supply LSD to CIA-backed Tibetan guerrillas resisting the Chinese occupation.
There is clearly some possibility the CIA had reason to desire control of the LSD supply in California. Their MKULTRA program had been researching the possibilities of using the drug for mind control purposes since well before recreational use became popular, and had discussed the research potential of an entire community on acid (e.g. the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco). The evidence that they did in fact, conspire to distribute underground LSD, or that Ronald Stark was involved, is tenuous at best, but is certainly worth looking at. In the words of Carl Oglesby, former head of Students for a Democratic Society:
What we have to contemplate nevertheless is the possibility that the great American acid trip, no matter how distinctive of the rebellion of the 1960s it came to appear, was in fact the result of a despicable government conspiracy.... If U.S. intelligence bodies collaborated in an effort to drug an entire generation of Americans, then the reason they did so was to disorient it, sedate it and de-politicize it.
VibraStone Mandala
http://capstoned.deviantart.com/art/VibraStone-Mandala-118937898
http://capstoned.deviantart.com/art/VibraStone-Mandala-118937898
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(c)2013, Aquarian Temple BEL, BrotherhoodofEternal Love.org
"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy
(c)2013, Aquarian Temple BEL, BrotherhoodofEternal Love.org
"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy