The psychedelic 60’s were now making its way to Miami and Norland Senior High. We experimented with marijuana, LSD, magic mushrooms, alternative lifestyles, new music and new ideas. Some friends and I started dealing marijuana – selling “Nickel Bags” which was marijuana that fit into those old match boxes. Although I didn’t know it at the time, this was the beginning of a marijuana marketing and smuggling career that would last a decade and a half and end with going to prison for marijuana smuggling.
Our class was the first group in Norland to embrace the hippie movement (some not all of us) and the class just one year before us missed that and we considered them part of the older generation with old fashion conservative ideas. In our class, when the police came to the school to show us what drugs looked like and how dangerous they were – one of our fellow classmates stole the sample of hash – and a few others smoked it behind the gym. We started wearing bell bottom jeans, started growing our hair long and went to love-ins at Greynold’s Park on weekends as the hippie generation was beginning to make its appearance in our part of the world. Selling marijuana and LSD for us at this time was more a way to “raise people’s consciousness” than a money making venture.
Any money we made from sales was used to pay for our own drugs so we could “Turn on, tune in and drop out” which was Timothy Leary’s battle cry and the marching orders we tried to follow. For us we were providing society with a much needed way to break free of our oppressive social norms and expand everyone’s awareness. Later, for some of us – our capitalistic and entrepreneurial instincts took over – and this became a very lucrative business enterprise.
“Hippie” by Barry Miles–1968 – It was the year of political activism and violence and the year of the great retreat to the country. It was the year that a commercial, superficial idea of the hippie lifestyle spread to the suburbs-through the medium of glossy magazines and pop music-and each town in America and most in Europe had a store where you could buy posters and rolling papers and the local underground paper. There were now more than 100 underground papers, ranging from the purely spiritual and psychedelic to the extreme radical, such as New York City’s Rat. Each major city now had hippie areas, or at least a hippie high street, but with high rents in the city centers hippies tended to live in groups, many of which became communes. There was a gay commune of 30 men living above a popular gay bar on Market Street, San Francisco, and hundreds living in geodesic domes in the original Drop City. There were subsistence farms, religious communities, ashrams, sex communes, covens and groups of followers of various gurus-most of whom were self-proclaimed. Most of them wore long hair, most of them smoked dope; to the general public they were all hippies. In France, a real revolution was played out along the lines of the Paris Commune, resulting in more than half the working population going on strike. Hippies were generally more politicized in Europe and a network of like-minded activists grew across the Continent. In England, however, most didn’t even notice.
From “Wikipedia” – Following in the well-worn footsteps of the Beats, most hippies used cannabis (marijuana and hashish), considering it pleasurable and benign. Many enlarged their spiritual pharmacopeia to include hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. On the East Coast of the United States, Harvard University professors Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) advocated psychotropic drugs for psychotherapy, self-exploration, religious and spiritual use. Regarding LSD, Leary said, “Expand your consciousness and find ecstasy and revelation within.”