We're All on Drugs

The emergence of the counterculture of the 1960s set off a new wave of music and created an alternative lifestyle. The association of drugs with the counterculture is a limited assumption as drugs were present in the mainstream culture as well. The predecessor of the 60s counterculture, the Beat movement, was not entirely different and it is evident how the Beat lifestyle fostered an environment where the emergent hippie and acid-head culture could take root. Within the drug culture there were splits in ideology, between the Leary and the Kesey groups and the mainstream culture against the counterculture’s use of drugs.

While the Beats experimented with drugs, they were more mild in their departure from the mainstream culture than the counterculture of the hippies and acid-heads . Tom Wolfe observed that, ““Kerouac was the old star. Kesey was the wild new comet form the West heading Christ knows where”” (Lytle, 4). Even though Kerouac was a major part of the Beat movement and experimented with drugs, he was not cut out for the world of LSD. When considering On the Road, Sal Paradise, does in the end return home to his mother just as Kerouac did when Neal Cassady tried to get him to join Kesey. In Howl, Allen Ginsberg laments over the deprivation of his generation. He addresses one of the roots of the problem, “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!” (Part II, l.5). He blames the mechanization of the mind, prefer a more steeped in nature approach, drugs as bringing us closer to our own nature The ideas of the Beats echo in the ideas of the counter: a rejection of materialism, an embrace of experimentation with drugs, sexuality, and forms of expression, especially music. The change from the Beats to the Hippies was not so much a ra...

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... they would turn to drugs as a retreat from their own miserable situation.

The drug culture was not limited to one group of individuals; different subgroups had their drug of choice. The belief that the drug culture was something that counterculture groups participated in is also a fiction, as there were other types of drug cultures present during the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s. However, alcohol, tobacco, and tranquilizers were the socially acceptable forms of drugs, so the demonization of LSD, marijuana, psilocybin, among others was allowed to take root and hold on strongly. It is only in the past few years that some of the states have decided to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. Perhaps greater knowledge of the actual affects of these traditionally vilified drugs will lead to a conversation that includes measures for legalization and control.