When The Sunshine Rose And Set On The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
By Ron Jacobs
[May 2010]
The popular history of the 1960s includes a number of stories that
are rife with rumor and unsubstantiated tales. From the possibility
of conspiracies that killed two Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, and
Martin Luther King, Jr to the rumors begun by a college student in
1969 that Beatle Paul McCartney was dead, the period was an
amalgamation of truths and exaggerations. Its history is the same
even today. One of the groups whose history has been always shrouded
in mystery is the Laguna Beach, California-based spiritual and drug
operation known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Intimately
connected to acid guru Timothy Leary and - through circumstance, LSD
and money - the Weather Underground and Grateful Dead, this band of
Southern California street toughs took LSD and became proselytizers
for a new world based on love and spirituality. Their story was the
subject of many a stoned conversation, DEA report, and partially
informed newspaper article. Given the fact that the folks involved in
the Brotherhood were smuggling, manufacturing and distributing
illegal substances, it's easy to understand why no members wanted to
talk about the group.
Investigative reporter Nicholas Schou has changed all that. In his
recently published book Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal
Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, Mr
Schou provides the most complete history of this 1960s phenomenon to
date. Based on numerous interviews, research, and driven by an
apparently intense interest in the subject matter, the story told in
Orange Sunshine captures the idealistic beginnings of the Brotherhood
and its disintegration into just another drug operation with guns,
egos and greed. While reading Schou's book, one can feel the genuine
desire of the group's founders to change the world through marijuana,
LSD, and an alternative way of living outside of the technological
suburban nightmare they perceived all around them. The transformation
of these founders from pot dealers, addicts, street toughs and
surfers who obtained their first acid by robbing a Hollywood
personality at gunpoint to a group led by John Griggs - a man Timothy
Leary called the holiest man in the world - reads like a novel under
Schou's pen. So are the story's next chapters as the Brotherhood
develops a scheme to smuggle hashish from Afghanistan into the United
States and use the profits to set up a utopia in the canyons of
southern California, manufacture Orange Sunshine LSD and turn on the world.
About That Orange Sunshine
During its heyday, rumors about Orange Sunshine were as rampant as
rumors about Bob Dylan playing at Woodstock. Some were true and some
you just hoped were true. The second time I ever ate acid was in 1971
and the source was a friend of mine who had gone to boarding school
in New England and then come to Germany to stay with his parents (who
worked for some US corporation). It was a summer afternoon in
Gruneburg Park in Frankfurt am Main. My friend took out a little
leather bag and produced two orange wafer thin tablets and a piece of
green blotter paper that had a drawing of the R. Crumb character Mr.
Natural on it. The orange tabs, this guy began, are Orange Sunshine
made by a guy in California who used to be Owsley's apprentice. You
only need half a tab. In what was probably one of the saner decisions
I ever made when it came to LSD, I took his advice and only ate half
a tab. Then the melting began. My buddy R saw the Grateful Dead in
1971 at the shows that would later be culled into the Skullfuck album
and insisted until his death that people on the stage at the Fillmore
East were shooting balls of paper with orange sunshine tablets into
the audience.
Even the Village Voice got into the Orange Sunshine story circle when
it ran a story in the spring of 1971 about a guy who went by the name
of Sunshine John. It seems John was somehow connected to the
Brotherhood and, as part of its mission to spread Orange Sunshine
around the world, was one of its primary distributors on the US east
coast. According to the story (and Schou, as well), there was an acid
drought in late 1968 because of the arrests of the primary US
manufacturers of the drug. Then, along came Orange Sunshine. Tens of
thousands of hits began to appear on the streets, at rock concerts
and in rural communes. Most of them were given away for free as part
of the Brotherhood's mission to spread peace, love, and acid. As the
experiences related above make clear, the acid continued to be
manufactured and distributed well into 1971 at least.
The Beginning of the End
Naturally, all this LSD drew the attention of the authorities. Until
the early 1970s, most of the anti-narcotics work concerning the
brotherhood had been carried out by local police in Laguna Beach. One
officer in particular, Nicholas Purcell, was behind most of the
arrests and harassment of the Brotherhood and those who distributed
its acid and hashish. With the intensification of the war on drugs
under Richard Nixon's White House, Purcell and his cohorts were able
to involve California and federal agencies in their mission to
destroy the Brotherhood. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood continued to
smuggle marijuana products and distribute LSD. Simultaneously many of
them were moving to Maui after the ranch in the canyons was raided
and Timothy Leary was arrested and their leader John Griggs overdosed
on synthetic psylocibin. In addition, the mission to spread peace and
love via LSD was foundering. Like so many other spiritually inclined
endeavors, when the Brotherhood lost their spiritual leader, the
mission became confused by the more earthly desires of some of those
next in line.
Egos and easy money transformed enough of those involved into just
another bunch of drug dealers with guns and cocaine. Drugs, too, had
ceased to serve a liberatory function. After those first few years of
revelation and communion, they were now often just crutches or, even
worse, tools of the oppressor. I knew this when acid and pot dealers
I knew began considering guns a necessary tool of the profession.
When old-time hippies who had always considered themselves providers
of a sacrament began thinking only in terms of dollars, the signs
were there. Greed became the watchword for some of its biggest
dealers and cynicism replaced the hopes of just a few years earlier.
To borrow a phrase popular at the time, like so much of the
counterculture, the Brotherhood had become part of the
over-the-counterculture. It had succumbed to the all powerful
capitalist god of cash.
The story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is simultaneously the
story of the southern California 1960s counterculture and a metaphor
for the phenomenon in its entirety. The story of Orange Sunshine LSD
could easily be the story of the later years of the 1960s US
counterculture. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that money,
ego, and law enforcement trumped everything else in that period known
as the Sixties in America, despite the most positive intentions.
--
Note: Ron Jacobs writes regularly for Counterpunch and is the author
of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground and
the novel Short Order Frame Up. He can be reached at [email protected].
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