Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

[2 articles]

Book Review:
Orange Sunshine:
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love,
and Acid to the World by Nicholas Schou

http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-orange-sunshine-the-brotherhood/

Author: Tim Gebhart
Mar 23, 2010

When people hear the word LSD or the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop
out," a couple images likely come to mind. One is Timothy Leary, the
most publicized advocate of LSD. Another is a group of spaced-out
hippies in psychedelic clothing (often optional) at a "be-in." What
probably doesn't come to mind is a smuggling operation responsible
not only for bringing tons of marijuana into the country from Mexico,
but manufacturing LSD and smuggling hashish from Afghanistan. Yet as
Nicholas Schou explores in Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of
Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the
World, those were among the main activities of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

The Brotherhood stemmed from a concept of a man named John Griggs.
Griggs was a marijuana dealer in Laguna Beach, Calif., in the
mid-1960s when he discovered LSD. Griggs quickly became an
evangelist. Despite his somewhat shady background ­ and many members
of the Brotherhood would have criminal records ­ Griggs quickly came
to believe that LSD was the path to enlightenment, a sacrament by
which to discover and commune with God. In fact, when Leary later
took up with the Brotherhood, he called Griggs "the holiest man who
has ever lived in this country."

Griggs gathered a tribe of followers who engaged in communal acid
trips. Originally about a dozen members, the group grew, dubbing
themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and actually forming a
church by that name. Griggs and a number of others were serious about
spreading peace and love through acid. "We were experiencing a whole
new viewpoint of life that was so beautiful and loving and caring of
others and the whole world. We felt connected to the source of all
life," one early member relates in the book. But opinions differed.
Owsley Stanley, one of the first and best known of the freelance
makers of LSD, cursorily dismisses the Brotherhood, calling its
members a "bunch of loose cannons on a ship of fools."

Schou, a reporter for the OC Weekly, did a feature article on the
Brotherhood in 2005. With Orange Sunshine he delves more deeply into
the group, interviewing not only about a half dozen of the original
members, several later members and law enforcement officers. Even if
spreading peace, love and LSD to the masses was the Brotherhood's
goal, Schou leaves little doubt that its criminal activity was
equally, if not more, widespread. Members of the group smuggled tons
of marijuana in from Mexico and distributed millions of hits of acid.
In fact, starting in 1967 the group would be responsible for the
manufacture and distribution of millions more hits of a form of LSD
with 200 times the regular dosage, an LSD tablet Griggs would call
"Orange Sunshine," Several members of the group also made repeated
trips to Afghanistan to smuggle tons of hashish into the U.S. The
book also suggests that members of the Brotherhood who ended up
living on Maui after smuggling tons of marijuana into the state were
responsible at least in part for the development of a strain of
marijuana that came to be known as "Maui Wowie."

Some of the smuggling reflected a blend of two California cultures.
Many of the prominent Brotherhood members were surfers. Surfboards
often became the mechanism for smuggling marijuana, hash or LSD
across borders. In fact, not only does one of those surfboards appear
in the Jimi Hendrix film Rainbow Bridge that was shot on Maui,
members of the Brotherhood appear in the movie.

Orange Sunshine seems less focused than Schou's prior book, Kill the
Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed
Journalist Gary Webb but there are a few reasons for that. First,
this is a far broader subject involving dozens and dozens of
individuals. Additionally, many who were involved in the Brotherhood
remain reluctant even today to talk about it and its activities. In
fact, it is perhaps surprising how many people agreed to be
interviewed by Schou, although as the book occasionally notes, the
arrangements for some interviews were rather unique. Yet all this
leaves the book feeling a bit amorphous at times and it is at times
difficult to track the various alliances within and associated with
the organization.

Whether the Brotherhood was as massive a drug smuggling operation as
its members claim or the book suggests, there is little doubt it was
a major cartel. Law enforcement cracked down on the Brotherhood on
August 5, 1972, arresting 57 persons associated with it and
confiscating two and a half tons of hash, 30 gallons of hash oil and
1.5 million tablets of Orange Sunshine. Following the busts, Rolling
Stone called the group the "Hippie Mafia." Since its inception, the
Brotherhood had clearly moved from its goals of enlightenment to to a
commercial drug dealing enterprise. In some ways, that transformation
could be viewed as mirroring the transition of the 1960s to the
1970s, Certainly, the cry of ""turn on, tune in, drop out" had
already rung hollow by then.

Orange Sunshine may not be the definitive book on LSD culture of the
1960s. Still, it provides insight into an aspect of that milieu and
counterculture with which few are familiar.

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

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book24-2010mar24,0,2597283.story

An OC Weekly writer reveals the dark side of the 1960s drug culture
by tracking down members and associates of the Orange County
counterculture group, who spoke of it for the first time in decades.

By Erik Himmelsbach
March 24, 2010

In the 1960s, a group of psychedelic-loving misfits from Orange
County called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love figured it could turn
the entire world on to the mystical power of LSD.

It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time -- the brotherhood had
been founded on a shared belief in LSD's transformative effects. But
somewhere along the line, the spiritual message was squashed by
thousands of kilos of smuggled marijuana and hashish.

By decade's end, the psychedelic messengers had sidetracked into a
smuggling operation that made the group one of the largest drug
cartels in America.

Instead of enlightenment, the members of the brotherhood wound up
making their mark as narcotics trailblazers: They distributed Orange
Sunshine, arguably the most popular "brand" of LSD in history;
created the strain of pot known as Maui Wowie; and were the first to
bring Afghan hash to the U.S.

For a while, they were America's foremost counterculture outlaws,
dubbed the "hippie mafia" by Rolling Stone. But the organization
ultimately fell prey to greed, back-stabbing and legal heat. And when
it was gone, it barely registered an acid flashback, even after
biographers, documentarians and Madison Avenue began to strip mine
the hippie era for material.

Yet in "Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its
Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World," Nicholas Schou
manages -- amazingly -- to penetrate four decades of silence.

A staff writer at OC Weekly, Schou first wrote about the brotherhood
for that paper in 2005, and now he's unfurled a true-life ghost
story, interviewing dozens in and around the brotherhood's orbit,
many of whom are talking on the record for the first time.

The result is a mind-blowing scrap of found history, like something
buried deep in the earth -- and you cannot avert your eyes. It's a
bizarre tale in which freakazoid suburban 1960s kids live recklessly,
blissfully unaware of just how close to the edge they are.

The roots of the brotherhood can be traced to Anaheim in the early
1960s, when Orange County was an "American Graffiti" landscape of hot
rods and hoodlums. One such figure was John Griggs, just another
average low-grade dealer and user -- until he dropped acid in 1965
and became a devotee of Timothy Leary's lysergic philosophy and a
pied piper for the promotion of hallucinogenic drugs.

Griggs, Schou writes, "would recruit everyone he knew -- surfers,
street fighters, pot dealers and petty crooks -- into a tribe of
people who viewed acid as a sacrament, a window into God itself."

This loose but growing aggregation officially became the Brotherhood
of Eternal Love in October 1966. Their utopian agenda, aside from
turning on the world, involved a scenario in which the group would
relocate to its own island.

But such grandiose dreams didn't come cheap. Although they opened a
storefront called Mystic Arts World on Pacific Coast Highway, drugs
were always the primary source of the brotherhood's solvency.

In 1967, Griggs consulted the I Ching for advice about sending some
brothers to the Middle East to score hash. "The book said, 'Crossing
the great water will bring supreme success,' " brotherhood member
Travis Ashbrook recalls.

But while brotherhood members were shipping hash-filled cars back to
the States, Griggs developed a bond with Leary -- who'd moved to
Orange County at his suggestion -- that was tearing the group apart.

Many in the brotherhood distrusted Leary, Schou writes. To them, the
acid guru was a charlatan, addicted to fame and willing to glom on to
anyone willing to help promote his great cause: himself.

The entry of the high-profile Leary into the organization was
accompanied by increased scrutiny from law enforcement, which
prompted many members to flee California for Maui.

Filling the void were nefarious characters more interested in money
and fear than peace and love. The name of the brotherhood, Schou
notes, "now was being hijacked by dope pushers and used as a sales
pitch or a marketing device."

After Griggs died in 1969 of a drug overdose, the group lost its
tenuous bond. Business became more ruthless. The drugs got heavier.
Mistakes were made, and, in 1971, the police finally brought them
down. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was left to rest in peace.

That is, until now. With "Orange Sunshine," Schou has crafted a
definitive history of the dark side of the 1960s. It's a jarring but
important reminder that the black-and-white filter that many of us
bring to the decade is really shot through with gray.

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