forty Years ago this month, lsd was made illegal. That same year, a gang of bikers downed weapons and became the brotherhood of eternal love , a 750-strong religious group dedicated to supplying acid to the burgeoning counterculture. david may , co-author of a cult book about the group in the early 80s, looks back on a “hippie mafia” that unwittingly set the template for the modern drugs black market.

It was midnight in the vast high acres of the Joshua Tree National Park in the

summer of 1966. The phalanx of motorcycles was parked, surrounded by yucca trees, their twisted stems making fantastic shapes in the cold mountain air. The

bikers, a motorcycle gang called the Street Sweepers, shared out LSD tablets, stolen

at gunpoint from a Hollywood film producer just an hour before.

With all the seriousness of a sacrement, each took the equivalent of 1,000 micrograms, four times a normal dose, and 15 times what people might take

today. The hours melted away, their minds flooded with vibrant colour and intense

revelation. And when the dawn sun burst across the Californian sky, their leader,

a long-haired young man called John Griggs, threw his gun into the shrub and shouted, “This is it. This is it!” That was indeed “it” for the biker gang, as the rest of

them also threw their weapons into the dirt and stepped onto a path that would lead

to the formation of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and one of the most intriguing stories behind psychedelic pop culture.

The new life that the bikers took to would eventually see them described as

a “hippie mafia” that ran a worldwide drug-dealing and manufacturing network said

to have grown to over 750 people at its height, and whose members and associates included Hells Angels, suspected CIA agents, terrorists, Cambridge academics,

Britain’s most renowned drug dealer Howard Marks, and the world-famous LSD

guru Timothy Leary, whose radical injunction to “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” had

become the catchphrase for both hippie rebellion and the marketing of countercultural consumerism. By the time the global operation was finally busted and shut

illustration WILL SWEENEY

118 DAZED & CONFUSED
DAZED & CONFUSED 119