Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood Of Eternal Love And Its Quest To Spread Peace, Love, And Acid To The World (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
A terrific look at a group of 1960s dopers who set out to change the world, one tab at a time. In the wilds of Laguna Canyon, even then a refuge for artists and eccentrics, a band of marijuana connoisseurs formed a brotherhood to smuggle the best dope available in from Mexico and make it widely available at low prices. Meantime, across the country, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were getting kicked out of Harvard for experimenting with LSD, and on the West coast, Owsley and others were beginning to manufacture it in wholesale batches. The Brotherhood itself remained secret for many years, although lots of dope dealers with stronger profit motives claimed membership, and eventually it disintegrated in a cloud of confusion, greed, and acrimony as colder and more addictive drugs, such as cocaine began to claim the scene. John Griggs, the spiritual center of the Brotherhood (Leary called Griggs his guru) comes across as a hazy saint who made promises he couldn't keep. and Leary was clearly an egomaniac of global proportions. The writer, Nicholas Schou, may take the spirituality of the early brotherhood a bit too literally (I was sort of there, at a remove, and all doper groups had good people and bad, with the bad usually ascendant because they were better focused, almost always on money), but this is an elegant piece of after-the-fact reporting, and how he got some of these people to talk is beyond me. The tales of Afghan hash smuggling alone are worth the price of admission, and the long sequence about Maui Wowie, Jimi Hendrix, and the filming of "Rainbow Bridge" is drop-dead hilarious.Anyone with any curiosity about the sixties or where the DEA came from (it was formed to deal with the Brotherhood) will enjoy this book. I loved this book and the way the writer writes. I will now get his titles from before. It was fascinating that some do good have fun loving hippies just wanted people in orange County in the 60's to be High and have a great experience, but then as in any group or business greed plays a role and it became a multi million dollar operation which then brought problems. I was so into the stories that I can't wait until january when I'm in that part of Cali. so I can spot some of the places from the book. Best book I have read this year by far.
What do You think about Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood Of Eternal Love And Its Quest To Spread Peace, Love, And Acid To The World (2010)?
Interesting as a historical document, though pretty disjointed as a story.
—Aleisha
Boy. We were so dumb in the 60's. What a bunch of fools.
—cindycla88
I enjoyed the story but thought it read like a textbook.
—chanel
