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It is in the hope of settling that precious state, and defining his position in it, that the hippie uses drugs—first for kicks and then sometimes as a kind of sacrament. Anti-intellectual, distrustful of logic, and resentful of the American educational process, the hippie drops out —tentatively at first—in search of another, more satisfying world.
Follow the River. "The standard thing is to feel in the gut that middle-class values are all wrong," says a West Coast hippie. "Like the way America recognizes that Communism is all wrong." They feel "up tight" (tense and frightened) about many disparate things —from sex to the draft, college grades to thermonuclear war. Hallucinogenic drugs like marijuana and LSD, they believe, are the knives that cut those knots. Once unleashed, most hippies first become insatiable hedonists, smoking and eating whatever can turn them on in a hurry; making love, however and with whomever they can find (including "group grope") that "feels good and doesn't hurt anybody"; saturating the senses with color and music, light and motion until, like an overloaded circuit, the mind blows into the never-never land of selflessness. The middleclass ego, to the hippie, is the jacket that makes society straight, and must be destroyed before freedom can be achieved. One East Coast hippie recently held a "funeral" for his former self. "You must follow the river inside you to its source," he said, "and then out again."
In a recent study, three University of Southern California graduate students interviewed 18 randomly selected LSD users for a period of four months, found that the primary quality in common was a history of unhappy family life. All of the acidheads were loners and losers, with few friends and few accomplishments before they dropped out. They were definable in three main subspecies: the "groovers," graduates of the 16-to-19 mod-togged teeny-bopper school who take drugs mostly for libidinal kicks; the "mind trippers," 17 to 22, who wear flowers and unassuming dress, and turn to hallucinogens mainly for therapy; and the "cosmic conscious" hippies, introspective, mystical and "spaced" (out of communication), whose drug use is primarily Eucharistic in nature, an attempt to "find God."
Land of Cockaigne. Whatever his status, the hippie is a confirmed believer in the benefits and benefices of his own way of life—even though he recognizes that if all the world were hip, he could not survive without a return to work and routine hang-ups. "Hippiedom is more than a choice of life style," says Chuck Hollander, 27, drug expert for the National Student Association.
"It's an apolitical systemicide." If there were a hippie code, it would include these flexible guidelines: >Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. > Drop out. Leave society as you have known it. Leave it utterly. > Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them