Imo the drug culture of the 70s was escapist and self-indulgent. I don't know if this was also the case in the 60s, but the newness and general idealism, the willingness to try something Really Different and listen to it, seems to have lent the 60s drug movement (in close concert with the other lifestyle elements being simultaneously tried by the same people, more or less) a bit more cultural weight. The inability to deny the legitimacy of the movement that so frightened Nixon, the last steward of the America portrayed in "Happy Days".
In any case it ended, and as Neocon observed, the casual hippies and college drug experimenters grew up, got real-world jobs and mortgages. (And in the late 70s, those mortgages displaced ALL thought about losing a weekend to tripping.)
Intoxicants are ultimately a luxury. Like travel, they can be either a completely empty way to blow a whole wad of cash, or maybe, ideally, a learning thing. I like to concentrate on the potential for good. My main motive isn't drug evangelism - this differentiates me from Leary and Alpert. (The other thing that differentiates me is that I came to these things waaay too late in my life to strain my ticker with stout doses of "shut up and hang on" kind of drugs.) My main motive is to question our nation's government's de facto policy of deciding what we get to do with our own bodies. And to open to discussion the idea, the suspicion that many drugs have been the goats of an awful lot of propaganda. I don't want to romanticize drugs in the process.
Nice palindrome four-of-a-kind grub btw. |
