Re[2]: Query: Go Ask Alice

kslinkar@lionheart.berkeley.edu
Tue, 27 May 97 14:56:44 PST

To All:

I think the nature of the drug experience will continue to be a point
of controversy. I was in the Haight in its heyday (brought there by
the Army in time for the "Summer of Love", 1967). I did a lot of
drugs. I did a lot of sex. I was avant garde and achieving a new
consciousness. I thought I had the world by the tail.

In retrospect, I found the politicos to have been hyper and grim; much
too self-righteous by half. I found the "hippies" to have been
stoned, exhuberant, shallow and mainly just young with no sense of
past or future. Ultimately, an awful lot of us became drug and
alcohol abuse casualties. The spread of casual drug use to the
general public dating from then is still afflicting us. What the
upshot of that cultural phenomenon will be is still unknown, but it
doesn't look good from here.

What you have said about the government was true and more. But I
don't think most of us were more than minimally aware of it. Speaking
for myself, I mainly was escaping from repressive sexuality and found
drugs freed my inhibitions while the hippy ethos rationalized it all.
I had more fun than I ever had before or since. And I did grow more
mature and politically astute.

For my money, the most revolutionary culture of the sixties was the
music!

By the way, I (and some of you) personally know Mike B., and
"conservative" is far from an appropriate epithet. But as with most
Marxists, he does take a dim view of drug use ("It killed the Panthers
worse than the FBI ever could.") Mike and I have both lived long
enough to see the dark side of the hippy heaven.

Karl Slinkard
kslinkar@library.Berkeley.EDU

______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: RE: Query: Go Ask Alice
Author: sixties-l@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU at AA_GRAPELINK
Date: 5/27/97 8:23 AM

I couldn't agree more with you Mark. I had many good experiences to to
dispel the bad experiences. I'm getting tired of hearing the rhetoric from
the conservatives about how bad and evil the 60's cultural revolution was.
Many good ideas came from the opening of our minds about the staus quo.
Being good citizens, appeased with economic good times in the post WW2
era,the baby boomers were better educated and with mass communications
expanding,were able to add up that 2+2 did not equal 5. The government was
doing a little social engineering and it just could not cover it's ass with
secrecy anymore. The citizens were "blind faith" followers and accepted the
fact that the "government" could be trusted. The governments attitude was
the "They don't know what it takes to run a government, it is so ugly that
we will just keep them from knowing what we are really doing" attitude. The
changes started coming when the government tried to destroy the "new' music
that was beginning to catch on with the teens. When kids started seeing the
manipulation of music and then started seeing that the government had been
manipulating information about many things.

This diatribe about how evil the 60's was is like a flashback to that era.
All this hype about the drug war is pure BS. People have been taking
intoxicants since the beginning of time. It is the few that cannot control
themselves that become physically and mentally addicted to the euphoria of
an altered state of conciousness. It is not the drug(or alchohol) that
causes this problem, it is the mental state of these people that feel that
something is missing in their lives and they turn to drugs/alchohol to
forget their misery. I speak from personal experience.

The drugs did nothing to the Haight District, the people that were in a
self-destruct mode did it.
If you are going to use a book that is an "Anti-Drug Hysteria" type book,
you should assign books that give all views.
Ron Nelson
POORBOYS MUSIC
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/POORBOYSMUSIC/index.html

A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is
learned by heart and repeated over and over. -- Joe Hill



>The Haight/Ashbury drug experience was only positive in the sense that it
>spawned the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic which became the foremost source for
>treatment information on drug abuse. The effects of drugs on the Hiaght was
>to destroy the community.
>MikeB
>
>>As long as you point out to your class that that book only represents a
>>fraction of the 60,s Drug experience. The vast majority had positive
>>experiences with drugs.
>>Make sure you point out that the book is Anti-Drug Hysteria, then assign
>>some of Tim Leary's books for balance.
>
>> Mark S. Goldstein
>>Woodstock Nation Online [ http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/4618 ]