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.
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