Acid, Greasers, Hippies and Violence: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

With slick hair, a wry smile and a penchant for violence, John Griggs was the picture of a Sixties California greaser. His gang caused chaos across Anaheim, and Griggs himself was a habitual user of hard drugs. Until, one night in 1966, they robbed a Hollywood pool party for its acid, Griggs took a bunch, and almost overnight pivoted to becoming one of America's leading proponents of psychadelics—right when hippie culture and the Summer of Love was at its peak. Griggs' cult-like Brotherhood of Eternal Love became a lodestar for America's counterculture—and a gigantic smuggling operation from Mexico and the States, to the so-called Hippie Trail, stashing Afghan and Nepali hash in cars, film reel cans or even surfboards before reaping the thousand-percent markup back home. Griggs' goal was to flood America with so much LSD that every man and woman would get high and help create a new, peaceful utopia. When renowned academic and acid-lover Timothy Leary joined Griggs' cause, the Brotherhood may have looked unstoppable. Then it was stung by disaster after disaster—from hardened criminals and police informants, to Leary's manic downfall and a plucky local cop named Neil Purcell. Part 1 of our show on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love charts John Griggs' irresistable rise to messianic stardom, and his group's creation of a new, potent acid named Orange Sunshine, just before his utopian vision began metastasizing into something most folks would later know as the "Hippie Mafia". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices