FROM RUNAWAY TO HIPPIE

[Music] is [Music] feet [Music] so [Music] people call them the flower children and the love generation and they laugh at the hippies and the hippies laugh at the people for they know that the hippie movement is not flowers and love or beards and beads the hippie movement is dope drugs lsd marijuana methamphetamines all of these eventually but to start with it is often just glue a blob of airplane cement in a paper bag and it can start quite young her name is debbie she's been sniffing glue since she was 10. she is now 13. [Music] debbie and her brother chuck and their friends pool their allowances to rent this apartment in dallas to hold blue parties [Music] and their mother sits at home knowing vaguely what her children are about with their glue parties but only vaguely these two seem to do nothing and have no feeling of responsibility however i don't understand it it has only occurred within the last two or three years since the death of her father [Music] this is another party another apartment it too is a communal apartment rented for glue sniffing by some 16 17 and 18 year old boys in dallas this was an all-day all-night party glue and wine they got very high concentrated inhalation of blue vapors can cause hallucination disruption of motor functions euphoria it can also cause blindness paralysis severe impairment even death for it is poison this they either do not know do not believe or do not care they are moved to what seems under drugs to be the most profound and searching religious dialogue a cliche becomes luminous insight and babbling is engraved on stone god god is god is what you make him you damn right for some people they say god is dead because someone came to them and told them that they were god yeah they were killed so god has said the mind is not god no yeah you don't think so i think [Music] glue is the start not long after this party was held in dallas some of these young people would find their way to marijuana to lsd to the hippie hovels of the hadash beret in san francisco there as here chasing hallucinations and finding agony [Music] this is the agony of crashing he has been very high and is crashing very hard this is the physical and mental anguish of withdrawal from the poisonous effects of the glue vapors [Music] his friends suggest that he sniff more glue and make it better he does and makes it worse [Music] [Music] he seeks the comfort of fresh air and finds the rain there is an informed estimate that one million american teenagers use drugs these scenes may be ugly but they are not uncommon not flowers and love or beards and beads but dope that is how the hippie movement starts and that is why it exists sniffing glue in an apartment in dallas was the beginning for donny and chuck and white eyes but it was only the beginning a man came to their apartment offering them marijuana and lsd they took it and wanted more he said they should come with him to san francisco for san francisco he said is where it's at in san francisco when a few people gather on hippie hill there is marijuana pot and when there is pot people do gather [Music] a girl moved amongst them distributing free samples of lsd acid the best known brand in san francisco is called ously acid named after augustus ously stanley an enterprising young man who does not like to have his picture taken and it rarely is but this is he nicknamed the acid king housley acid has helped make the hate ashbury section of san francisco the acid capital of the world that is why chuck and donny and white eyes and their friends came here from dallas san francisco is where lsd was first marketed where it is most readily and cheaply available like the amsterdam diamond market and the chicago grain market san francisco is the world's acid market where buyers and sellers of lsd there meet probably no more than five chemists illegally manufacturing it in the area but they produce enough for one hundred thousand tabs of lsd each week a sideline san francisco is estimated also to smoke a ton of marijuana each week [Music] donny and chuck in white eyes told their parents in dallas they were coming here to play in a band they came for acid and pot [Music] that is why thousands upon thousands come to live amid the poverty and trash of the hippie hubbles of the haight ashbury give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe pot [Music] the hippie and the hate feels like an animal in the zoo there's not much to do all day long and there are all those tourists with all those cameras they say the people particularly the press exploit them in fact they exploit the people peddling their own vulgar journalism their own psychedelic trinkets only by this or by panhandling or dealing can they buy the acid and pot that brought them here this is what the tourists gawking at the eccentrics is subsidizing there is an undefined sociological relationship between taking dope and protesting something stirs them to march even when they can't think of anything to protest against in the park of a bright afternoon there is a hippie wedding the preacher is a man called teddy bear he is a dope dealer lsd washed down with wine is the only sacrament there are no vows she will be his woman for as long as they feel like it frankie to be a woman for your wife be married before god before the people [Music] [Laughter] [Music] all is love sweet and tender unbridled by the social inhibitions of the establishment the straight world [Music] [Laughter] another couple wanders by is moved by the spirit and they decide they too should get married and it all seems so typical of the hippie movement but teddy bear here knows better he told a reporter there never were any flower children it was the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the american public and it is your fault you the mass media this community he said is not based on love this community is based on dope nicholas von hoffman a reporter for the washington post lived in the hate for three months and wrote one of the most incisive series on the hippie movement he said there are conservative and liberal hippies there are hippies who hate the establishment and those who are indifferent to it there are hippies who love money there are hippies who love love but if the word means anything he wrote it means a hippie of the three boys we saw from dallas two were arrested on marijuana charges and given three years probation the other was sent home as a runaway the time comes a person feels he has to get away to be alone to love [Music] to study [Music] to meditate [Music] to take dope this is the latest stage in the evolution of the hippie movement the hippies are trying to get away the world has been too much with them and they seek escape so they go out to a cabin in the countryside and start a commune a group of compatible hippies sharing their rice and beans and hepatitis and venereal disease disease is a nagging problem in these new hippie communes still there are many of these communes growing up particularly in the west this one is in northern california it is called ben lomond here perhaps to the accompaniment of a visiting rock band they can get away from the tourists and the reporters who badger them in san francisco from the rents and bills and cost of living in a big city and from the police [Music] they work the land with the ardor of neo-pioneers they try to raise their own food they try to be as self-sufficient as they can for that way what money they get they don't have to use to buy meat they can buy drugs the drugs are illegal the children the second generation of hippies are mostly illegitimate a mother said she gave her 20 month old baby lsd and if the straight world doesn't like it they don't care some of the straits come to their commune to see them to gawk at them or to buy marijuana from them [Music] a lid of pot five dollars we said hippie communes are springing up all over this curious clutch of geodesic domes is in southern colorado it's called drop city to drop in hippie language means to take lsd that is what they are doing here again at the commune in northern california dropping acid taking lsd it is so much freer and it is so much easier out here what will follow this dispersal of the hippie movement of the countryside is hard to predict they may be as they say coming here to build the foundations for a new society in this nation a drug society or they may be coming like the woolly mammoth to find their own extinction some hippies believe the greatest allies they have in spreading dope throughout this country are the mass media of this country every day the radio plays drug music get yourself a little green day tripper and the teenagers get the message from these they know that green is marijuana a trip is a drug experience they don't need captain midnight decoder rings to figure it out in magazines they see psychedelic fashions inspired by drugs on television they see comedians lightly joking about taking pot and turning on and even that straightest of all straights perry como innocently presents a psychedelic number which for six minutes looks like a coast-to-coast drug hallucination whatever the motives of all this the message teenagers get from it they say is that drugs are fun and that they are what's happening within people hippie leaders say they cannot set the climate for a drug culture in this country by themselves the masked media must help spread the word and they believe that the mass media are doing 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