The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia:

Tendler, Stewart & May, David. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia: The Story of LSD Counterculture.(Book review).

It's hard to fathom at this late date, but once upon a time there were a significant number of intelligent people who believed that the world would be a much better place if everybody ingested psychedelic drugs and that such drugs should be provided free, or at least without profit. And one of the few semi-organized loci of such thought was a mysterious cohort of Californians known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

Who or what was this Brotherhood? According to famed "dope lawyer" Michael Kennedy, who defended some of them when they got into trouble, "It was a loose-knit group of individuals, the common denominator being that they all believed in psychedelics, they all believed in hallucinogenics and they all believed that the world would be better if more people took psychedelics. And what they tried to do was spread as many psychedelic substances as they could around the land. Sort of like Johnny Appleseed" (Rosenbaum 1994).

This book was originally published in 1984, but was then quickly withdrawn from print, thus becoming an expensive collector's item. In this new version, the authors provide a new forward and epilogue but do not mention any reason for the previous disappearance, leaving that among the numerous mysterious elements to this story. Whoever authorized the garish dayglo-type cover art should remainr mysterious as well, but otherwise, it's a fascinating read about a now long-ago wild yet relatively innocent and idealistic time when the inner and external horizons of culture seemed open to virtually any interpretation and stretching.

The story of LSD has been told in great and skilled detail in at least two books since the original publication of this one (Stevens 1998; Lee & Shlain 1985). From Hoffman's inadvertent discovery of LSD to Huxley's explorations through Leary and Alpert's Harvard experiments and debacles to the explosion of 1960s counterculture and acid rock and so forth, the tale is well-documented, and has been analyzed and romanticized ad nauseam. So why is this book worth reading, at least for those still interested?

Well, the Brotherhood were a unique element of their time, at a minimum. Legally incorporated in 1966--ten days after LSD became illegal--in California, the tax-exempt organization declared a dedication "to bring to the world a greater awareness of God through the teachings of Jesus Christ, Rama-Krishnam Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, Mahatma Gandhi and all true prophets and apostles of God." Some of their nascent ideology was reflective of Timothy Leary's east coast League of Spiritual Discovery, but the BOEL were headquartered in Laguna Beach, California, "a sleepy little township and artists colony and resort thirty miles south of Los Angeles." As for membership, "there were no fixed rules for joining; no name signing or ritual. But there was one basic rule among the Brothers--they believed in taking as much of the psychedelics as possible, the largest doses of LSD they could buy."

In the beginning it was a relatively benign scene, as reported by one early Brother who was part of the early group living in few houses in idyllic Laguna Canyon: "There was a lot of grass and there was a vibe that you could make it with love and digging each other. It was cheap and it was fun. You know the bond, the thing that tied us up together was surfing and dope and balling." The focus went from grass to LSD and large quantities of hash rather quickly, it seems, and before long, a "hippie mafia" (as it was labeled by local law authorities and then Rolling Stone magazine) was in effect. But before then, for just just a couple years, the Brotherhood were at the center of "a Haight-Ashbury on the sea."

During that brief period of dreams and relative innocence, Orange Sunshine LSD was tossed out freely at concerts and on the beach. "John Gale, a rising figure in the Brotherhood's distribution network, was spreading the word for the Brothers' new LSD in the best way he knew how: on Laguna Beach he handed out 100,000 doses in a day." The group was associated with a cool surf shop and the famed Mystic Arts World, a crafts market/open air illegal pharmacy (this reviewer recalls walking through Mystic Arts at the age of 13 or so and being offered LSD, hash, and other drugs I'd never heard of; I also recall a health food store with a real camel living out back).

The Brotherhood's products/sacraments did not stay free for long. As this book puts it, "the group's task may have been divine, but the fruits were certainly worldly." Linked with (in)famous Grateful Dead-associated LSD (al)chemist Owsley Stanley up in San Francisco, and with Leary on the east coast, the Brotherhood's operations got grandiose and risky. Cash was everywhere, ranches were bought, surfboards full of hash were made and mailed around the world, an infamously incoherent Jimi Hendrix film was financed, and at one point a tentative offer was tendered to the government of France to buy a tiny Pacific French island to become "the world's first independent state based on LSD." Timothy Leary's son, at a Laguna Brotherhood gathering, torched one of many $1000 bills, and when Leary called to apologise for his offspring's behavior, he was told "Hey, Uncle Tim, we all wanted to burn a thousand-dollar bill. It was a great thing he did, very enlightening."

Legal authorities were not so enlightened or amused. In Laguna Beach--which sits in Republican stronghold Orange County, just up the coast from Nixon's West Coast White House--longhairs started to get busted for just being there, and suspicions were aroused by the presence of money and Leary. Still, the Brotherhood funded Leary's famous escape from California prison and supported him with an extra $25,000 while he was the exiled guest/hostage of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria. State, Federal and and international investigations got underway as well. Mystic Arts World burnt to the ground in a 1970 fire widely viewed as arson that was approved, if not committed, by local authorities. By the time a couple of founding leaders has overdosed or been arrested (including Leary, who turned out to be more liability than leader) trouble was everywhere for the Brothers. A big bust became pretty much inevitable, and in 1972 it came. "Between 1966 and 1971 the Brotherhood was virtually untouchable, but in the course of the investigation 750 members had been identified in a business the IRS estimated to be worth $200 million." Such estimates tend to be inflated, but no matter, the BOEL corporation was assessed over $70 million in back taxes (the book does not say whether any of that assessment was ever paid). Members rolled over and turned one another in to avoid doing time. A government report estimated that the Brotherhood was held responsible for 50% of all the LSD and hash to be found in the United States.

By then much of the illegal activity had shifted to Europe, as personified by a mysterious figure named Ronald Stark, who flitted around the world under various false identities (multiple fake passports were a Brotherhood specialty). Here the story gets a bit more mundane, even though it involves more clandestine laboratories and international intrigue. The founding and early Brothers died--in such manners as decapitation in a Porsche--did prison time, or just drifted away, and the harder-edged types who stayed in the business for the big money took over, for awhile at least. "Only the players had changed--not the game."

Tendler and May find a few surviving figures in this updated version of their book, all of them older and some wiser (they also quote from a lengthy newspaper article that does not appear in their updated bibliography; Schou 2005). "As flawed as it is, having a civilization seems much better than anarchy; this is one of the reasons why I wonder if we made a mistake in scattering acid to the four winds" reflects one key figure. Another key figure "saw himself and the Brotherhood as part of a great tradition of semi-secret societies driven by a powerful doctrine and stretching back to the original Sufis, early Islamic mystics, and the Knights Templar. In the case of the Brotherhood their divine sacrament was LSD. Like other outcasts before them, they had accepted calumny, vilification, and persecution for their beliefs."

Perhaps. The persecution may not have been quite so intense if so much illegal money had not become central to the faith. But in any event, this is a fascinating story. A filmed documentary is forthcoming, and maybe another book, and certainly verbal lore about the Brotherhood will continue for some time, or at least as long as the Summer of Love generational mythology remains commercially viable. Tendler and May are wise enough to admit they might not have all the facts down pat. "Establishing a single truth in such an epic narrative of idealism and betrayal, wealth and corruption as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a story where so many people's lives depended on the truth not being told, is probably an impossible ambition."

In renowned writer Robert Stone's new memoir Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, he recalls his experiences with Ken Kesey's iconic Merry Pranksters, who were sort of a precursor to the Brotherhood. "The drugs which we believed so important a part of our liberation, the key to the music, the doors of perception for an elite, became a mass youth phenomenon," he observes. "They caused much suffering and parental anguish, and they forged a weapon for the darkest forces in American society, the witch-hunting, punitive-minded hypocrites who promptly gave us the War on Drugs as they had given us Prohibition ... We may not have had any choice, but in the end we allowed drugs to be turned into a weapon against everything we believed in."

Thus, as went the dreamers in the original Brotherhood, so went a generation and a nation.

REFERENCES

Lee, M.A. & Shlain, B. 1985. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. New York: Grove Press.

Rosenbaum, R. 1994. Michael Kennedy: An interview. In: A. Nocenti, & R. Baldwin (Eds.) The High Times Reader. New York: Nation Books.

Schou, N. 2005: Lords of Acid: How the Brotherhood of Eternal Love became OC's Hippie Mafia. OC Weekly July 7.

Stevens, J. 1998. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. New York: Grove Press.

Stone, R. 2007. Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. New York: Ecco.

Reviewed by Steve Heilig, M.P.H.*

* Director, Public Health & Education, San Francisco Medical Society, San Francisco CA.

Reputation Comments on this post:

thorough review, references and all