There's been brief mentions of the BoEL in some of the Haze threads as well as talk of surfers with mystery seeds lately, so I thought I might try, with your help, to tie it all in.
With the upcoming documentary movie, "Orange Sunshine" on the horizon, and Nick Schou's book Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, scheduled for release in March 2010, it seems like a good time for an overview.
So let's start off w/ a Wikipedia take:
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was an informal organization of psychedelic drug enthusiasts and dealers that operated in the late 1960s. The group was founded in Laguna Beach, California. The group was headquartered in the Mystic Arts bookstore on Pacific Coast Highway. At that time, Laguna Beach was a common stopping point for those traveling south from Haight Ashbury to Mexico. Timothy Leary, the excommunicated Harvard psychology professor and devotee of free love and author of "turn on, tune in and drop out," became the godfather of the group.
One contributor writes that the group was composed of local surfers, drug users and rich kids from Orange County, Los Angeles and the Pasadena area. This is contested by another contributor, who points out that the genesis of the Brotherhood was a rag-tag crew of very young street toughs in Compton, California - in a poor neighborhood - who in the course of smoking multiple kinds of vegetation and swallowing random available pills for recreational purposes, accidentally encountered LSD. At least a half-dozen of them found their lives transformed by that experience and, in due time, moved south to modest bungalows in the little-known town of Laguna Beach. They tended to wear simple cotton garments, sometimes robes. Most were vegetarians, and they daily spent considerable time in prayer and simply doing good deeds. Many of them continued to practice their own version of Christianity while opening research into Hinduism, Vajrayana Buddhism, and indigenous and Eastern religions as Brotherhood members happened to find them.
For several years, their psychedelic activities were underwritten by selling high-quality marijuana. As business expanded, they decided to see if they could build a national distribution network. Farmer John and Chuck Scott bought a new station wagon, loaded it up with kilo bricks of marijuana and drove from Laguna Beach to the Holland Tunnel. They took almost six weeks to move the load because New York's hippie market for marijuana at the time of their arrival was small and informal. Distribution of the Brotherhood's first wholesale load began the creation of an entirely new market and sales pyramid.
After sales prospered, the Brotherhood began to send researchers around the world to look into purchasing opportunities. Red Lebanese and black Afghan hashish were favored because of their strength, perfumes, and popularity among buyers in the USA. Other varieties of hashish were also purchased and imported in volume. At a certain point, the cash flow was more than sufficient for them to set up their own laboratory in which to manufacture LSD. The elder chemist was the bright and quirky Owsley Stanley, nicknamed Bear, who favored "cocktails", mixtures of LSD and small amounts of amphetamine, though there was no amphetamine in Owsley's acid. It was pure, and much of it was actually made by Nick Sand.
By the late 1960s, what had begun as a brotherhood of idealistic young pacifists had been infiltrated and corrupted by cynical outsiders, some of them armed. The brotherhood of love was gone; the informal organization's name was arrogated by punks and crooks who soon became notorious and widely detested.
The Brotherhood operated originally as a psychedelics distribution network throughout the United States, most notably in California where the organization received large shipments of hashish from Pakistan and Afghanistan, helped by Welshman Howard Marks, now a prominent figure in the cannabis culture. Some of the best Hashish that was imported were the half circle 'Elephant Ears' in the early 1970s .With funds from their hashish smuggling, the organization produced and distributed large amounts of the legendary "Orange Sunshine" LSD. The organization was headquartered on a ranch in Garner Valley, near Idyllwild. Members paid the Weather Underground to break Timothy Leary out of prison.[1] The organization may have been inspired by, but did not evolve from, Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery or the International Foundation for Internal Freedom. Many of its members were interested in peace and in ending the Vietnam war. A 1972 Rolling Stone article dubbed them the "Hippie Mafia."
The Brotherhood also had a small vegetarian restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway, two blocks north of Mystic Arts, named "Love Animals, Don't eat them". This restaurant operated with volunteers, with much of the food donated. Menu items did not have a price and patrons left donations for the food ordered.
Members of the Brotherhood felt that the Vietnam War was not only illegal but that President Richard Nixon was using drug laws to imprison political opponents. Members Johnny Gail and Victor Forsythe advocated putting LSD in Nixon's punch. Grace Slick was recruited for that effort but the mission was not successful. Victor Forsythe was entrapped into sales of Brotherhood hashish in 1972 and after a year long trial, which resulted in a hung jury, he jumped bail and fled to Ecuador in 1973. In late 1974, Victor was arrested by US drug agents, and after three months of fighting extradition, was returned to the United States where he pleaded guilty in a plea bargain arrangement with the Orange County prosecutor. His book, Birth of an Angel, describes details of his arrest. During his imprisonment in Orange Country jail Victor was assaulted by a white supremacist prison gang and almost killed. After recuperating in the hospital, Victor completed the rest of his sentence in solitary confinement.
Timothy Leary had this to say about the Brotherhood: "The whole concept of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is like a bogeyman invented by the narcs. The brotherhood was about eight surfer kids from Southern California, Laguna Beach, who took the LSD, and they practiced the religion of the worship of nature, and they'd go into the mountains. But they were not bigshots at all. None of them ever drove anything better than a VW bus. They were just kind of in it for the spiritual thrill.
Nick Schou is a writer for OC Weekly, and I will link you to a few of his articles that should make the basis for his book.
First off is the resurfacing of Mike Hynson. He was one of the two surfers in the 'Endless Summer' from 1966.
This sheds a little light on the surfer angle:
http://www.ocweekly.com/2009-07-09/news/mike-hynson-the-endless-summer-the-brotherhood
Here's another one of his stories:
http://www.ocweekly.com/2005-07-07/features/lords-of-acid/1
In recent news, After nearly 40 years on the run, the last member of the so-called
"Hippie Mafia" to evade the long arm of the law, has finally been
captured, the Weekly has learned. Brenice Lee Smith, who grew up in
Anaheim, was one of the founding members of the Laguna Beach-based
Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group of hippie hash smugglers who
befriended Timothy Leary and sought to turn on the entire world
through their trademark acid, Orange Sunshine. He was arrested by U.S.
customs agents at San Francisco's International Airport at about 9
p.m. on Sept. 26, just minutes after arriving from Hong Kong in the
second leg of a trip that started a day earlier in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Smith (pictured above, second to left, bottom row, in the famous 1972
Brotherhood of Eternal Love wanted poster) is now being held at a jail
near the airport in Redwood City thanks to two nearly 40-year-old
warrants relating to his involvement in the Brotherhood. A jail
spokesperson said Smith was expected to be extradited for arraignment
in Orange County sometime this week. However, Susan Schroeder, a
spokeswoman for the Orange County District Attorney, said she had no
information about any extradition or warrants involving Smith,
although she stated that could be because the warrants are so old.
Along with many other members of the Brotherhood, Smith, better known
as "Brennie" among family and friends, traveled to Kandahar,
Afghanistan in the late 1960s and smuggled hashish back to California
inside VW buses, mobile homes, and other vehicles. The Brotherhood
also distributed more LSD throughout the world than anyone else, and
famously raised cash with acid sales to bust Leary out of prison and
help him escape to Afghanistan, where he was finally arrested in 1973.
Smith was indicted for his role in the group but was among about a
dozen members who managed to evade arrest in August 1972 when a task
force made up of federal, state and local cops raided Brotherhood
houses from Laguna Beach to Oregon to Maui--where many members of the
group had fled after OC became too hot--and arrested some 50 people.
The last Brotherhood fugitive to be captured was Orange Sunshine
chemist Nicholas Sand, who was arrested in British Columbia in 1996.
Sand spent several years in prison for manufacturing LSD. Two years
earlier, a friend of Smith's named Russell Harrigan, was arrested by
police near Lake Tahoe, California, after they learned his real
identity. However, a judge dismissed the charges against Harrigan
because he'd lived a crime free life, quietly raising a family.
Details now emerging about Smith's life in the past few decades
suggest he too may have a strong case for having his own charges
dismissed. After living underground in California for several years,
Smith finally fled for Nepal in 1981. "He absolutely wanted to go,"
says Eddie Padilla, another founding Brotherhood member who is also
married to Smith's niece, Lorey James. "He was tired of running around
trying not to get arrested here in the US. Then he left and went over
to India, then Nepal and lived in the mountains 8000 feet up in this
monastery for five, six, seven, or eight years as a shaved head monk.
He fell in love with this guru, Kalu Rinpoche."
According to Padilla and James, Smith kept in touch with them in
frequent letters from Kathmandu, where he moved after Maoist
guerrillas began attacking monasteries in the Himalayan foothills. In
Kathmandu, Smith, who took the name Dorje at the behest of Rinpoche,
married a Nepalese woman, Rukumani, and fathered a daughter, Anjana,
who is now 21 years old.
Recently, James says, her uncle seemed worried about both the mounting
political violence in Nepal and his daughter's future there. "He was
starting to get concerned about Anjana," James says. "He wanted her to
be here, because the opportunities for her are so vast here compared
to any kind of life she could have in Nepal." So Smith went to the
U.S. Embassy in Nepal and applied for a passport under his real name--
something he hadn't done since before smuggling hash in the late
1960s. "He got the passport and I think he was thinking, and so were
we, that if they [the cops] wanted him, that would be the time to get
him."
Both James and Padilla were waiting at the airport to greet Smith
along with William Kirkley, a filmmaker who is working on a
documentary about the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and his co-producer
and cinematographer, Rudi Barth. Kirkley says he had hoped to travel
to Nepal to interview Smith, but had to cancel the trip. "We were
talking to the Nepalese embassy, but it seemed so dangerous and we
didn't know if we'd have power there half the time," he says. "It
seemed kinda sketchy. So Brenny agreed to come out here and we got him
a round trip ticket. We were there at the airport and we had our
cameras all ready to go and the microphones ready to go."
After 30 minutes or so, however, it was clear that something was
wrong. Padilla, James and Kirkley's documentary crew watched other
passengers clearing customs on a flat screen TV in a nearby lobby.
"Everyone came and went and 10 or 15 minutes later, we see two police
officers on the screen. Seeing them at that point, we totally knew it
involved [Smith] and it wasn't good." Kirkley says he hopes to
interview Smith soon, and says he hopes the interview won't be through
the bars of a jail cell. "I am hoping they see that [Smith] completely
changed his life around, became a Buddhist monk and is much more
rehabilitated than he would have been if he had gone to prison. We're
all hoping for the best outcome."
Now to top it all off, I was recently looking thru my old Sinsemilla Tips when I came across this letter from 1988. Check it:
Also, here's a link to the 1984 book, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love,From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia: The Story of the LSD Counterculter
Stewart Tendler and Davaid May can be found here http://www.druglibrary.net/schaffer/lsd/books/belcont.htm
or a PDF of it can be found online.
Lastly, it would be nice to create a 'counterculture history' forum for things like this. I know it doesn't exactly belong in 'Strains and Hybrids', but the people who would be interested in this the most, frequent this forum, so...
A lot to absorb, hope you enjoy!
With the upcoming documentary movie, "Orange Sunshine" on the horizon, and Nick Schou's book Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, scheduled for release in March 2010, it seems like a good time for an overview.
So let's start off w/ a Wikipedia take:
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was an informal organization of psychedelic drug enthusiasts and dealers that operated in the late 1960s. The group was founded in Laguna Beach, California. The group was headquartered in the Mystic Arts bookstore on Pacific Coast Highway. At that time, Laguna Beach was a common stopping point for those traveling south from Haight Ashbury to Mexico. Timothy Leary, the excommunicated Harvard psychology professor and devotee of free love and author of "turn on, tune in and drop out," became the godfather of the group.
One contributor writes that the group was composed of local surfers, drug users and rich kids from Orange County, Los Angeles and the Pasadena area. This is contested by another contributor, who points out that the genesis of the Brotherhood was a rag-tag crew of very young street toughs in Compton, California - in a poor neighborhood - who in the course of smoking multiple kinds of vegetation and swallowing random available pills for recreational purposes, accidentally encountered LSD. At least a half-dozen of them found their lives transformed by that experience and, in due time, moved south to modest bungalows in the little-known town of Laguna Beach. They tended to wear simple cotton garments, sometimes robes. Most were vegetarians, and they daily spent considerable time in prayer and simply doing good deeds. Many of them continued to practice their own version of Christianity while opening research into Hinduism, Vajrayana Buddhism, and indigenous and Eastern religions as Brotherhood members happened to find them.
For several years, their psychedelic activities were underwritten by selling high-quality marijuana. As business expanded, they decided to see if they could build a national distribution network. Farmer John and Chuck Scott bought a new station wagon, loaded it up with kilo bricks of marijuana and drove from Laguna Beach to the Holland Tunnel. They took almost six weeks to move the load because New York's hippie market for marijuana at the time of their arrival was small and informal. Distribution of the Brotherhood's first wholesale load began the creation of an entirely new market and sales pyramid.
After sales prospered, the Brotherhood began to send researchers around the world to look into purchasing opportunities. Red Lebanese and black Afghan hashish were favored because of their strength, perfumes, and popularity among buyers in the USA. Other varieties of hashish were also purchased and imported in volume. At a certain point, the cash flow was more than sufficient for them to set up their own laboratory in which to manufacture LSD. The elder chemist was the bright and quirky Owsley Stanley, nicknamed Bear, who favored "cocktails", mixtures of LSD and small amounts of amphetamine, though there was no amphetamine in Owsley's acid. It was pure, and much of it was actually made by Nick Sand.
By the late 1960s, what had begun as a brotherhood of idealistic young pacifists had been infiltrated and corrupted by cynical outsiders, some of them armed. The brotherhood of love was gone; the informal organization's name was arrogated by punks and crooks who soon became notorious and widely detested.
The Brotherhood operated originally as a psychedelics distribution network throughout the United States, most notably in California where the organization received large shipments of hashish from Pakistan and Afghanistan, helped by Welshman Howard Marks, now a prominent figure in the cannabis culture. Some of the best Hashish that was imported were the half circle 'Elephant Ears' in the early 1970s .With funds from their hashish smuggling, the organization produced and distributed large amounts of the legendary "Orange Sunshine" LSD. The organization was headquartered on a ranch in Garner Valley, near Idyllwild. Members paid the Weather Underground to break Timothy Leary out of prison.[1] The organization may have been inspired by, but did not evolve from, Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery or the International Foundation for Internal Freedom. Many of its members were interested in peace and in ending the Vietnam war. A 1972 Rolling Stone article dubbed them the "Hippie Mafia."
The Brotherhood also had a small vegetarian restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway, two blocks north of Mystic Arts, named "Love Animals, Don't eat them". This restaurant operated with volunteers, with much of the food donated. Menu items did not have a price and patrons left donations for the food ordered.
Members of the Brotherhood felt that the Vietnam War was not only illegal but that President Richard Nixon was using drug laws to imprison political opponents. Members Johnny Gail and Victor Forsythe advocated putting LSD in Nixon's punch. Grace Slick was recruited for that effort but the mission was not successful. Victor Forsythe was entrapped into sales of Brotherhood hashish in 1972 and after a year long trial, which resulted in a hung jury, he jumped bail and fled to Ecuador in 1973. In late 1974, Victor was arrested by US drug agents, and after three months of fighting extradition, was returned to the United States where he pleaded guilty in a plea bargain arrangement with the Orange County prosecutor. His book, Birth of an Angel, describes details of his arrest. During his imprisonment in Orange Country jail Victor was assaulted by a white supremacist prison gang and almost killed. After recuperating in the hospital, Victor completed the rest of his sentence in solitary confinement.
Timothy Leary had this to say about the Brotherhood: "The whole concept of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is like a bogeyman invented by the narcs. The brotherhood was about eight surfer kids from Southern California, Laguna Beach, who took the LSD, and they practiced the religion of the worship of nature, and they'd go into the mountains. But they were not bigshots at all. None of them ever drove anything better than a VW bus. They were just kind of in it for the spiritual thrill.
Nick Schou is a writer for OC Weekly, and I will link you to a few of his articles that should make the basis for his book.
First off is the resurfacing of Mike Hynson. He was one of the two surfers in the 'Endless Summer' from 1966.
This sheds a little light on the surfer angle:
http://www.ocweekly.com/2009-07-09/news/mike-hynson-the-endless-summer-the-brotherhood
Here's another one of his stories:
http://www.ocweekly.com/2005-07-07/features/lords-of-acid/1
In recent news, After nearly 40 years on the run, the last member of the so-called
"Hippie Mafia" to evade the long arm of the law, has finally been
captured, the Weekly has learned. Brenice Lee Smith, who grew up in
Anaheim, was one of the founding members of the Laguna Beach-based
Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group of hippie hash smugglers who
befriended Timothy Leary and sought to turn on the entire world
through their trademark acid, Orange Sunshine. He was arrested by U.S.
customs agents at San Francisco's International Airport at about 9
p.m. on Sept. 26, just minutes after arriving from Hong Kong in the
second leg of a trip that started a day earlier in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Smith (pictured above, second to left, bottom row, in the famous 1972
Brotherhood of Eternal Love wanted poster) is now being held at a jail
near the airport in Redwood City thanks to two nearly 40-year-old
warrants relating to his involvement in the Brotherhood. A jail
spokesperson said Smith was expected to be extradited for arraignment
in Orange County sometime this week. However, Susan Schroeder, a
spokeswoman for the Orange County District Attorney, said she had no
information about any extradition or warrants involving Smith,
although she stated that could be because the warrants are so old.
Along with many other members of the Brotherhood, Smith, better known
as "Brennie" among family and friends, traveled to Kandahar,
Afghanistan in the late 1960s and smuggled hashish back to California
inside VW buses, mobile homes, and other vehicles. The Brotherhood
also distributed more LSD throughout the world than anyone else, and
famously raised cash with acid sales to bust Leary out of prison and
help him escape to Afghanistan, where he was finally arrested in 1973.
Smith was indicted for his role in the group but was among about a
dozen members who managed to evade arrest in August 1972 when a task
force made up of federal, state and local cops raided Brotherhood
houses from Laguna Beach to Oregon to Maui--where many members of the
group had fled after OC became too hot--and arrested some 50 people.
The last Brotherhood fugitive to be captured was Orange Sunshine
chemist Nicholas Sand, who was arrested in British Columbia in 1996.
Sand spent several years in prison for manufacturing LSD. Two years
earlier, a friend of Smith's named Russell Harrigan, was arrested by
police near Lake Tahoe, California, after they learned his real
identity. However, a judge dismissed the charges against Harrigan
because he'd lived a crime free life, quietly raising a family.
Details now emerging about Smith's life in the past few decades
suggest he too may have a strong case for having his own charges
dismissed. After living underground in California for several years,
Smith finally fled for Nepal in 1981. "He absolutely wanted to go,"
says Eddie Padilla, another founding Brotherhood member who is also
married to Smith's niece, Lorey James. "He was tired of running around
trying not to get arrested here in the US. Then he left and went over
to India, then Nepal and lived in the mountains 8000 feet up in this
monastery for five, six, seven, or eight years as a shaved head monk.
He fell in love with this guru, Kalu Rinpoche."
According to Padilla and James, Smith kept in touch with them in
frequent letters from Kathmandu, where he moved after Maoist
guerrillas began attacking monasteries in the Himalayan foothills. In
Kathmandu, Smith, who took the name Dorje at the behest of Rinpoche,
married a Nepalese woman, Rukumani, and fathered a daughter, Anjana,
who is now 21 years old.
Recently, James says, her uncle seemed worried about both the mounting
political violence in Nepal and his daughter's future there. "He was
starting to get concerned about Anjana," James says. "He wanted her to
be here, because the opportunities for her are so vast here compared
to any kind of life she could have in Nepal." So Smith went to the
U.S. Embassy in Nepal and applied for a passport under his real name--
something he hadn't done since before smuggling hash in the late
1960s. "He got the passport and I think he was thinking, and so were
we, that if they [the cops] wanted him, that would be the time to get
him."
Both James and Padilla were waiting at the airport to greet Smith
along with William Kirkley, a filmmaker who is working on a
documentary about the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and his co-producer
and cinematographer, Rudi Barth. Kirkley says he had hoped to travel
to Nepal to interview Smith, but had to cancel the trip. "We were
talking to the Nepalese embassy, but it seemed so dangerous and we
didn't know if we'd have power there half the time," he says. "It
seemed kinda sketchy. So Brenny agreed to come out here and we got him
a round trip ticket. We were there at the airport and we had our
cameras all ready to go and the microphones ready to go."
After 30 minutes or so, however, it was clear that something was
wrong. Padilla, James and Kirkley's documentary crew watched other
passengers clearing customs on a flat screen TV in a nearby lobby.
"Everyone came and went and 10 or 15 minutes later, we see two police
officers on the screen. Seeing them at that point, we totally knew it
involved [Smith] and it wasn't good." Kirkley says he hopes to
interview Smith soon, and says he hopes the interview won't be through
the bars of a jail cell. "I am hoping they see that [Smith] completely
changed his life around, became a Buddhist monk and is much more
rehabilitated than he would have been if he had gone to prison. We're
all hoping for the best outcome."
Now to top it all off, I was recently looking thru my old Sinsemilla Tips when I came across this letter from 1988. Check it:
Also, here's a link to the 1984 book, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love,From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia: The Story of the LSD Counterculter
Stewart Tendler and Davaid May can be found here http://www.druglibrary.net/schaffer/lsd/books/belcont.htm
or a PDF of it can be found online.
Lastly, it would be nice to create a 'counterculture history' forum for things like this. I know it doesn't exactly belong in 'Strains and Hybrids', but the people who would be interested in this the most, frequent this forum, so...
A lot to absorb, hope you enjoy!
Last edited:
We can only hope 20 yrs later that a few of these intrepid souls are carrying on, what great foresight! 
Nice read of an old mag I used to read back in the day,and might
