The true story of the drug-smuggling, church-founding “Hippie Mafia”: “A definitive history of the dark side of the 1960s.” —Los Angeles Times
Few stories in the annals of American counterculture are as dramatic as that of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. They began as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers. But after discovering LSD, they embraced Timothy Leary’s mantra of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation.
Just days after California became the first US state to ban LSD, the Brotherhood formed a legally registered church in its Laguna Beach headquarters, where they sold blankets and other paraphernalia. Before long, they also began to sell Afghan hash, Hawaiian pot (the storied Maui Wowie), and eventually Colombian cocaine, much of it smuggled in secret compartments inside surfboards and VW minibuses driven across the border.
They befriended Leary, enlisting him in the goal of buying a tropical island where they could install the former Harvard philosophy professor and acid prophet as the high priest of an experimental utopia. The Brotherhood’s most legendary contribution to the drug scene was homemade: Orange Sunshine, their trademark acid tablet that produced an especially powerful trip. Their foot soldiers passed out handfuls at communes, Grateful Dead concerts, and love-ins up and down the coast. The Hell’s Angels, Charles Manson and his followers, and the unruly crowd at the infamous Altamont festival all tripped out on this acid. Jimi Hendrix even performed a private show for the Brotherhood on the slope of a Hawaiian volcano.
Journalist Nicholas Schou takes us deep inside the group, combining exclusive interviews with both the surviving members and the cops who chased them. A wide-ranging narrative of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll (and more drugs), Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of peace and free love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia.
