The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Timothy Leary and the Rise of LSD

Mark Walston

On August 5, 1972, one of the biggest raids staged in America’s so-called “war on drugs” took place when a task force of state, local and federal law enforcement agencies combined to take down a secretive group of hippie LSD dealers and hashish smugglers known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.  Police and federal agents busted dozens of members in California, Oregon and Hawaii – and sent an even larger group scattering around the world.

The group had begun as a self-sustaining, anti-establishment commune in the mid-1960s, settling into a wooded tract in Orange County, California, led into the countryside by counterculturalist John Griggs.  By the mid-1960s, however, the group had evolved into one of the nation’s largest producers of LSD – lysergic acid diethylamide, the hallucinogenic drug most commonly referred to as “acid.”  Reported one federal agency, “Between 1966 and 1971 the Brotherhood was virtually untouchable, but in the…

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