The 1960s hippies were enthusiastic members of a psychedelic counter-culture fuelled not only by rejection of the spiritual vacuum of the 1950s, but also by drugs. Cannabis and LSD were used as symbols of rebellion, and as a way to push out the boundaries of perception. Recreational drug use soared, transcending earlier class and ethnic boundaries. As early as 1953 the English novelist Aldous Huxley tried mescaline, chemically related to LSD. He found himself "better equipped to understand the unfathomable Mystery". Huxley had an interest in psychological liberation, and the hallucinogenic drug gave him spiritual insights and transcendence from "self-conscious selfhood". As a result of his experimentation, he wrote The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (in the latter he admitted that drug-induced visions could take the tripper to hell as well as to heaven). LSD had been discovered accidentally in the 1940s by a Swiss chemist looking for a cure for migraine. For a long time it was kept within the ranks of the medical profession, but by the latter part of the 1960s it was everywhere.
One of LSD's most enthusiastic supporters was a Harvard professor, Timothy Leary, who declared it was time: "for far-out visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new, empirical, tangible metaphysics was desperately needed, knowing in our hearts that the old mechanical myths had died at Hiroshima . . . Politics, religion, economics, social structure are based on shared states of consciousness. The cause of social conflict is usually neurological. The cure is biochemical." It was Leary who coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out" (he himself was sacked for administering LSD to a student). The deals, visions and disaffection of the 1960s drugs culture were depicted in films such as Easy Rider and supported by a variety of artists and intellectuals who openly enjoyed trying everything. Some, such as Allen Ginsberg, survived to a hale old age. John Lennon's acid trips resulted in many of his best songs. But casualties of the darker side of the 1960s drugs bonanza included such major talents as Janis Joplin (a heroin addict who died of an overdose at the age of 27).
The year 1967 saw the Summer of Love. Consumption of both cannabis and LSD was at an all-time high. There were demonstrations in favour of decriminalising cannabis in the UK, where there had been only 100 convictions a year for cannabis use between 1945 and 1959, rising to nearly 2,500 in 1967 (some young people went to jail for two years for a single joint). That year the Wootton Committee instituted a full-scale report on its effects, concluding in 1969: "The long-term consumption of cannabis in moderate doses has no harmful effects." The report was trashed by home secretary James Callaghan, who was opposed to "the permissive society" that cannabis symbolised.
DRUGS such as opium and cocaine - if used for non-medical purposes - were made illegal in the US in 1915, the importation of heroin was banned in 1924, and cannabis was outlawed in 1937. The illegal drug trade blossomed. In the US today around 60 per cent of the prison population are drug offenders. In Britain cannabis was banned in 1939, but doctors were allowed to prescribe maintenance doses of heroin to addicts up until 1967, when the system changed to the US model. The number of drug offenders in Britain in 1969 was 7,000, rising to 94,000 in 1995. In 1996, British customs officers and police seized drugs valued at £500 million, yet only about 10 per cent of heroin that enters Britain is intercepted by police. In 1997 it was estimated that one in five crimes in Britain was committed by heroin addicts.
In spite of the UN agreement on the control of narcotic drugs in 1961, the revenue from illegal drugs is so high that the trade continues to flourish. In 1997, the UN released a report estimating that the world trade in illicit drugs now stands at $400 billion a year (eight per cent of international trade). A long way from the flower-toting, spaced-out, peace-and-love children of the 1960s.
The drug scene has come a long way since the flower-toting, peace and love children of the 1960s (above)
