Youth: The Hippies

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(enough to turn on the average user), its cost in potential chromosomal damage and long-lasting psychotic aftereffects is much higher—not to mention the fact that it is illegal to manufacture the drug without a federal license. Many hippies —particularly the weekend variety—have taken to using the shorter-lived and still legal DMT (dimethyltryptamine), which produces only a 45-minute trip, or else the related DET (diethyltrypta-mine), an equally short haul. Others are turning on to the milder pre-LSD hallucinogens: cactus-derived mescaline, the American Indian's peyote (it takes many bitter peyote cactus buds to achieve a high; usually, nausea comes first to the uninitiated), or psilocybin, which produces a giggly, warm high.

The newest item in the pharmacopoeia is a concoction called STP, apparently named after the gasoline additive ("It makes your motor run better," say hippies). Similar to a chemical-warfare product code-named "BZ," STP can produce a 72-hour trip—up to six times the length of an LSD voyage—and generates the "blinding white light" of hallucinatory omniscience that many hippies claim is the be-all and end-all of the drug experience. Believed to be a chemical called 5-methoxy-NN-dime-thyltryptamine, STP cannot be treated, as LSD is, by use of chlorpromazine tranquilizers to ease a bad trip: it only accentuates the symptoms.

The mastermind behind STP is widely believed to be a mysterious figure named Augustus Owsley Stanley III, 32, grandson of a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, a San Francisco-based hippie chemist who got into the turn-on business two years ago, before the manunfacture and distribution of LSD was made illegal. Known as "the Henry Ford of Psychedelia," Stanley—or Owsley, as he calls himself—is said to have amassed a million-dollar fortune from acid before he turned 31 and the drug was banned. Owsley is dedicated to "turning the whole world on," and not necessarily by acid alone; he is a patron of the Grateful Dead, a San Francisco acid-rock group second only to the Jefferson Airplane in national popularity. Owsley's next product, says the grapevine, will be a super-hallucinogen called FDA in honor of the Food and Drug Administration.

Morning Star. A major new development in the hippie world is the "rural commune," some 30 of which now exist from Canada through the U.S. to Mexico. There, nature-loving hippie tribesmen can escape the commercialization of the city and attempt to build a society outside of society. At "Drop City," near Trinidad, Colo., 21 hippie dropouts from the Middle West live in nine gaudy geodesic domes, built from old auto tops (200 apiece at nearby junkyards), and attempt a hand-to-mouth independent life. An hour's drive north of San Francisco, in apple-growing country near Sebastopol along the Russian River, some 30 to 50 country hippies live on a 31-acre ranch called Morning Star. Their closest neighbor: Cartoonist Charles Schulz, whose Peanuts people are hippie favorites. The ranch is owned by Lew Gottlieb, 43, former arranger, composer and bassist for the folk-singing Limelighters, who has his hippie followers hard at work—rarest of all hippie trips—growing vegetables for the San Francisco Diggers.

Most Morning Star colonists avoid acid. "I'd rather have beautiful chil- dren