Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World

While reading a bio of Augustus Stanley Owsley I found a recommendation for a BEL bio which was different than this one. Having read this, I'd recommend the other book unless you're REALLY into the BEL history. The writing was mediocre and the author doesn't write narrative well. It does contain many revelations about that era to which I'd not been privy. The Laguna Beach scene was a continuation of the San Fran scene. Many fled the bay area for Laguna after the summer of love went sour. There must be smething about psychedelics which leads geographically disparate groups of people down very similar life paths. I've read similar stories from other people and places. My own life reiterated the patterns as well.The author never went into the chemistry of orange sunshine which was prduced by BEL member Nick Sands after Owsley was gone. It was purportedly not LSD itself, but a close polymer, ALD-52, and quite as active. It took LSD and ornge sunshine many times. Th sunshine was different. Acid can be unsettling and pushy coming on, but not ALD, which was smoother. ALD also produced stronger visuals. .Some batches were very strong. I liked sunshine better, myself.

I expected to like this book and boy did I! These guys were smart, resilient, resourceful and apparently had balls of steel! This is an easy to read fast moving book about people I knew nothing about although I lived through the time and I've read widely about it! The Brotherhood of Eternal Love were the biggest hash smugglers of the era and one of the most broadly successful LSD distribution organizations of the post legal era. I remember the "Orange Sunshine" of the time, in the early 70’s, but I didn't know how we got it and where it came from. If you are interested in this time and place there is a lot to be learned here including the “high minded” initial motivations of this young group of Southern California Acid Head Surfer Dudes. Throw in Tim Leary and Andy Warhol for good measure! This is a great read!

Imagine getting blasted on pot and putting Jimi Hendrix's "Band of Gypsies" on the stereo system. A few minutes later, Hendrix himself walks in with a six-pack of Miller High Life, saying "I don't like that album. It's imperfect." This is not fantasy but reality. It's the summer of 1970 on Maui, Hawaii, where Hendrix performed a free concert on the slopes of the Haleakala Volcano while being filmed, along with Les Potts (the lucky partaker of Hendrix's beer) and other Brotherhood of Eternal Love members for the music documentary,  Jimi Hendrix - Rainbow Bridge . This scene doesn't begin to describe the incidents and events packed into this history of the early LSD-drenched days of the sixties in the LA area (with excursions to Hawaii and Afghanistan). Many books have been written about the sixties. This one concentrates specifically on the cast of bizarre characters who morphed from petty rebel-with-a-cause-type criminals running around looking for people to beat up, into peaceniks out to save the world by means of (literally) millions of doses of Orange Sunshine - reputed to be the finest acid ever produced on a mass scale.Some of these events are so unbelievable as to scarcely be imagined and unlikely to ever occur again in any locale, like the 1970 "Christmas Happening" in Laguna Canyon, which attempted to outdo Woodstock by getting all 25,000 participants (150,000 were expected) high on acid after thousands of hits Orange Sunshine were dumped over the crowd by plane. The festival, with hordes of naked people, many freely having sex and many more extremely hungry due to nonexistent planning for food, was brutally broken up and cleared out a day later by the police. Then there was the very far-out smuggling operation employing a sailboat boat packed with high-grade marijuana that successfully made the journey from Mexico to Hawaii through high seas and storms - by a crew with little-to-no maritime experience and no navigation equipment except the starsFor all the wildness and insane schemes, this was an unprecedented era in modern times unlikely ever to be to repeated, when economic prosperity, an increasingly educated population, and the irrepressible American brand of creativity and individualism came together and flared for a few years before too many red lines were crossed and the Establishment came down hard. We have taken quite a detour since (Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes) but things may be picking up again with the groundswell of national support for marijuana legalization. The sixties is not over yet.Nicholas Schou did a lot of digging and has succeeded in weaving a richly detailed yet economically told account. The major lacuna, to my mind, is with so much focus on the histrionics and spectacles, and the author's suppressing of his own point of view in the interest of journalistic objectivity, we seldom get into the actual heads of the main actors (John Griggs, Eddie Padilla, Johnny Gale, Timothy Leary, etc.). LSD was the prime mover of this history, yet one almost suspects Schou himself has never ingested any (I can't believe he hasn't), what with the utter absence of any sustained descriptions of the LSD experience that would help clarify for the uninitiated reader what animated these crazy people to live fascinating lives on the edge (here we miss our genius drug muse Terence McKenna, e.g.  True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise ).

I came of age just as this stuff was making its way in to my mid-western, small town. Yes, I partook. WOW! I don't recommend drug use, but this stuff was something else. I had friends who took it and became fish, another made love to the lawn in back of our old high school, --- and as for me, the sky became Van Gogh's Starry Night as the the street wrapped up around us, and I found myself riding in a car shooting down a tube. This is an interesting history of a type of LSD that (and I say this with all candor and humility) changed the world. There are people walking around today, in high (forgive my use of that word) places, running things that ingested this stuff. Orange Sunshine rippled out through time and has shaped our world. (Sorry Bill, a lot of people did inhale.). --- This book is a well written history that filled in a lot of background of my youth, a good story that most are not aware of, and in today's sad and tragic drug culture, most will never understand. If you want to better understand the late 60's and early 70's, this is your book.

Excellent book, well written and very informative. As for accuracy? it's probably pretty accurate all things considered, some of the people are dead and some don't want to talk. A good companion to books by Timothy Leary,Tom Wolfe,Rhoney Gissen Stanley and other writers. In England in the sixties a lot of these events didn't get news coverage until they were actually over, if at all. Buy it,read it, dig it.If you don't like it give away and give someone else a chanceto.

kept the wife quiet

Great product good service.

A really well researched and written insight into the Californian sub-culture of the 60's and 70's. I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in this period. There certainly are some interesting characters and escapades described in these 300 or so pages.

The story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is certainly worth telling and telling accurately. Sadly this book is riddled with inaccuracies and judgements. The writing is in a third person voice, droning on and on. Important players, like Nick Sand are almost totally ignored. The major focus is on the hash smuggling aspects of the Brotherhood, short shrift is given LSD. Statements about repeated doses of LSD betray a complete ignorance of basic psychedelic pharmacology. Cheering the downfall of the organization at the hands of the police demonstrates a typical right wing Orange County attitude in a journalist that one would otherwise expect to be left wing.For a well written example of a book about this era see: Owsley and Me: My LSD Family by Rhoney Gissen Stanley and Tom Davis.