LSD And The Hippie Counterculture

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The Summer of Love became a symbol for everything the hippies stood for, while simultaneously becoming a symbol for everything they were not. Hippies were indeed "interested in getting stoned and having a good time." This was even more so the case with individuals that were there solely for the parties, drugs, sex, and music. ***these people were known as plastic hippies or weekend hippies???**** Furthermore, the use of psychedelic drugs was rampant among hippies. The use of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) as a mind-altering drug was favored among hippies for several reasons. Many saw it as a drug that would open the door to a world beyond perception, beyond everything they knew. Nothing emphasizes the importance more than how it was discussed …show more content…

In urban areas, hippies lived together and would give any other hippie to a place to sleep. These communes differed from the more radical kind of communes that were "springing up in remote rural areas." As tribesman described to Hedgepeth that rural communes were "an instinctive response by the human organism to a society by the human organism to a society that's become unnatural." Not all hippie communes were the same, though. This is evident in that "some communes permit[tted] LSD and marijuana," but was discouraged by others and some communes went so far as to ban them. Furthermore, by 1969, hippie communes did not practice free love. Instead, many communes practiced traditional heterosexual monogamy. Those who dropped out from society and lived in communes found that they were not at all prepared for the conditions of nature and that "many of the constraints they sought to escape are necessary." Regardless of the hardships hippies in rural communes faced, many were still motivated to continue this alternative lifestyle as best as they could. While numerically speaking, the hippie communes constituted the minority to communes that developed in the 1960's. Even so, they were "the best known (and certainly the subjects of the most media coverage) … [were] the countercultural encampments hat thumbed their collective noses at conventional American society and were regarded both with fascination and with loathing by members of the very Establishment that they rejected." Eventually, many communes would disband and much less of them exist today. Still, hundreds persist today and there has been a recent increase in interest for communal

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