A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock n\' roll that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of Peace and Love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia.
Journalist Nicholas Schou takes us deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews w.
Jimi Hendrix even appeared in a film starring Brotherhood members and performed a private show for the fugitive band of outlaws on the slope of a Hawaiian volcano.
The Hell\'s Angels, Charles Mason and his followers, and the unruly crowd at the infamous Altamont music festival all tripped out on this acid.
Brotherhood foot soldiers passed out handfuls of the tablets to communes, at Grateful Dead concerts, and at love-ins up and down the coast of California and beyond.
The Brotherhood\'s most legendary contribution to the drug scene was homemade: Orange Sunshine, the group\'s nickname for their trademark orange-colored Acid tablet that happened to produce an especially powerful trip.
They also befriended Leary himself, enlisting him in the goal of buying a tropical island where they could install the former Harvard philosophy professor and Acid prophet as the high priest of an experimental utopia.
Before long, they also began to sell Afghan hashish, Hawaiian pot (the storied Maui Wowie), and eventually Colombian cocaine, much of which the Brotherhood smuggled to California in secret compartments inside surfboards and Volkswagen minibuses driven across the border.
Just days after California became the first state in the union to ban LSD, the Brotherhood formed a legally registered church in its headquarters at Mystic Arts World on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, where they sold blankets and other countercultural paraphernalia retrieved through surfing safaris and road trips to exotic locales in Asia and South America.
After discovering LSD, they took to Timothy Leary\'s mantra of Turn on, tune in, and drop out and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of Acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process.
Dubbed the Hippie Mafia, the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California.
Few stories in the annals of American counterculture are as intriguing or dramatic as that of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. b&w photos throughout.
A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock n\' roll that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of Peace and Love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia
