The Hippies and American Values

Chapter 1: The Ethics of Dope

Chapter 1 The Ethics of Dope Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that’s how they did it in the first century a.d., and besides, telescopes are unnatural. —Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (1968) Smoke dope everywhere. . . . Dope is Great, it’s fun, it’s healthy. . . . Get every creature so stoned they can’t stand the plastic shit of American culture. . . . Smoke dope, it’s your duty to future generations, turn the world on, it’s your duty to the universe. —“Pun,” Other Scenes, June 1968 Nothing else was so characteristic of the counterculture as dope. The overwhelming majority of hippies used it, and most who didn’t approved of its use by others. The commitment to—as opposed to furtive use of—dope was the single largest symbol of the difference between counterculture and Establishment culture. The use of the term “dope” here instead of “drugs” is deliberate. To the hippies, it served to draw a line between substances perceived to be good and those deemed bad. Dope was good; drugs, on the other hand, included both good and bad substances. The distinction was imprecise, of course. Hippies 2 the ethics of dope disagreed a great deal about where the line between good and bad should be drawn. Very generally, most hippies approved of such substances as marijuana , hashish, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, and morning glory seeds. They were less approving, and often outspokenly critical, of amphetamines, methedrine, DMT, STP, barbiturates, the opiates, and sometimes cocaine. Psychedelics were good; speed and downers were bad. Substances that were perceived as expanding consciousness were good; things which made the user dumb were bad. A similar terminological distinction was made for merchandising : those who sold dope (and who used and valued it themselves) were dealers; those who sold drugs, the bad stuff, were pushers. But each individual made his or her own choices as to which substances fell into which category. There was no universally accepted dividing line between the two. Tom Coffin was one hip writer who delineated the distinction between dope and drugs: We’re talking about and doing Revolution, attack on all fronts, political, educational, religious, cultural, even business. . . . And dope is part of that revolution, and if you fear dope (Dope, not drugs—alcohol is a drug, pot is dope; nicotine is a drug, acid is dope; drugs turn you off, dull your senses, give you the strength to face another day in Death America, dope turns you on, heightens sensory awareness, sometimes twists them out of shape and you experience that too, gives you vision and clarity, necessary to create Life from Death) if you fear dope more than you fear Richard Nixon and his Machines Men of Death, then you have indeed sold out and bought in. . . . The difference between Stupor and Ecstasy is the difference between Jack Daniels and Orange Sunshine, between the Pentagon and Woodstock, between The New York Times and Good Times. We all have to make our choices.1 Usage in this chapter will follow this popular hippie perspective. “Dope” will be good and “drugs” bad, except that in some cases “drugs” will be inclusive of both types. I avoid those terms only in quotations, where the author’s language stands. Virtually everyone in the counterculture agreed that dope, whatever its correct name, was great. One all-star symposium sponsored by LEMAR International (the marijuana-legalization lobby), whose participants included Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Leslie Fiedler, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin, “agreed that the biggest problem with drugs is shitty drug laws and the bad research.”2 The counterculture saw the main “drug problems” as spotty quality and high prices. the ethics of dope 3 Dope was utterly intrinsic to the counterculture. The hippies believed that dope itself had altered the consciousness of millions of individuals in fundamental ways, and that that alteration was inevitably a major force in the establishment of the new culture. So contended Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) when he wrote, “We’ve moved in the direction of a whole new model of the human brain. . . . You can travel anywhere, back into childhood, back through evolutionary history, cosmic history, down your own bloodstream or nervous system.”3 And it made the new culture sweet. As Jan Hodenfield wrote about the Woodstock festival in Rolling Stone, “Equal to the outside’s anger and...