Dubbed the “Hippie Mafia,” the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California. After discovering LSD, they took to Timothy Leary’s mantra of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process.



Just days after California became the first state in the union to ban LSD, the Brotherhood formed a legally registered church in its headquarters at Mystic Arts World on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, where they sold blankets and other countercultural paraphernalia retrieved through surfing safaris and road trips to exotic locales in Asia and South America. Before long, they also began to sell Afghan hashish, Hawaiian pot (the storied “Maui Wowie”), and eventually Colombian cocaine, much of which the Brotherhood smuggled to California in secret compartments inside surfboards and Volkswagen minibuses driven across the border.



They also befriended Leary himself, enlisting him in the goal of buying a tropical island where they could install the former Harvard philosophy professor and acid prophet as the high priest of an experimental utopia. The Brotherhood’s most legendary contribution to the drug scene was homemade: Orange Sunshine, the group’s nickname for their trademark orange-colored acid tablet that happened to produce an especially powerful trip. Brotherhood foot soldiers passed out handfuls of the tablets to communes, at Grateful Dead concerts, and at love-ins up and down the coast of California and beyond. The Hell’s Angels, Charles Mason and his followers, and the unruly crowd at the infamous Altamont music festival all tripped out on this acid. Jimi Hendrix even appeared in a film starring Brotherhood members and performed a private show for the fugitive band of outlaws on the slope of a Hawaiian volcano.



Journalist Nicholas Schou takes us deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews with both the group’s surviving members as well as the cops who chased them. A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll (and more drugs) that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of peace and free love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia.

They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking On the Road's hero Neal Cassady as his driver on the cross-country revival tour and drawing on his own training as a magician, Kesey made Further into a bully pulpit, and linked the beat epoch with hippiedom. Paul McCartney's Many Years from Now cites Kesey as a key influence on his trippy Magical Mystery Tour film. Kesey temporarily renounced his literary magic for the cause of "tootling the multitudes"--making a spectacle of himself--and Prankster Robert Stone had to flee Kesey's wild party to get his life's work done. But in those years, Kesey's life was his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment.

Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to the abominable shaman of the "Acid Test" soirees that launched The Grateful Dead required Wolfe's Day-Glo prose account to endure (though Kesey's own musings in Demon Box are no slouch either). Even now, Wolfe's book gives what Wolfe clearly got from Kesey: a contact high. --Tim Appelo

Acid Dreams is the complete social history of LSD and the counterculture it helped to define in the sixties. Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's exhaustively researched and astonishing account-part of it gleaned from secret government files-tells how the CIA became obsessed with LSD as an espionage weapon during the early l950s and launched a massive covert research program, in which countless unwitting citizens were used as guinea pigs. Though the CIA was intent on keeping the drug to itself, it ultimately couldn't prevent it from spreading into the popular culture; here LSD had a profound impact and helped spawn a political and social upheaval that changed the face of America. From the clandestine operations of the government to the escapades of Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, Allen Ginsberg, and many others, Acid Dreams provides an important and entertaining account that goes to the heart of a turbulent period in our history. "Engaging throughout . . . at once entertaining and disturbing." - Andrew Weil, M.D., The Nation; "Marvelously detailed . . . loaded with startling revelations." - Los Angeles Daily News; "An engrossing account of a period . . . when a tiny psychoactive molecule affected almost every aspect of Western life." - William S. Burroughs; "An important historical synthesis of the spread and effects of a drug that served as a central metaphor for an era." - John Sayles.

Aya: a shamanic odyssey by Rak Razam 1. Ayahuasca 2. Shamanism 3. Counterculture 4. Memoir 'The vine has spread her tendrils across the world and a genuine archaic revival was underway. My bags were packed, South America beckoned and the ancient mysteries of the rainforest awaited. I wanted in on it...' When "experiential journalist" Rak Razam sets out to document the booming business of Amazonian shamanism in the 21st century, he quickly finds himself caught up in a culture clash between the old world and the new. Braving a gringo trail of the soul, he discovers a movement of seekers coming from the West to experience the multi-dimensional reality shamanism connects one to. Central to this is ayahuasca-the "vine of souls"-a South American hallucinogenic plant that has been used by Amazonian people for millennia to heal, cleanse and purify the spirit, connecting it to the web of life. As Razam trains with indigenous curanderos he lyrically documents his experiences and burgeoning relationship with the plant world. And the more he drinks this potent jungle medicine the deeper it leads him, from the wet jungles where the ayahuasca vine grows, to the middle of the Amazon and on into the raging heart of consciousness itself... Razam has a hip, breakneck style of reporting delicately threaded with deep insights and understandings of the indigenous view of reality. His journalistic eye for detail captures a unique spiritual adventure that echoes the archetypal Western quest, propelling you on a cosmological travel memoir that is at turns beautiful, terrifying, mind-blowing and ultimately, cathartic. Part journalistic account, part adventure, Aya is ultimately a love song to something intimately familiar to the human spirit. 'As Razam so aptly demonstrates, a new kind of traveler is emerging-one that embarks into the mysterious and uncharted domain within, where they aim to conquer their own heart. Written in the tradition of a great adventure narrative, AYA is a timely story for a new emerging era.' - Yossi Ghinsberg, author of Lost in the Jungle www.ayathebook.com

For some reason I favour the Kool-Aid one, but I dont know why

Ayahuasca in my blood, by Peter Gorman, is another really, really good one http://www.amazon.com/Ay...e-Dreaming/dp/1452882908

Left In The Dark by Tony Wright and Graham Gynn though takes the cake and is easily the most mind blowing and important piece of research I've ever read, hands down.

Oh my god ! These books mentioned here sound so good. I've just ordered Doors of perception because i still haven't read it and it sounds like a must-have. This thread is going into my favourites and i hope it never dies. Acid dreams and Ayahuasca in my blood are next on my list!

This is an ideas-led, exuberant documentary about the converging strands of a new era, the empowerments of cyber-technology, and the precipitation of new ways of life. Originally written in 1994, it outlines the strands of the cyber subculture as it was emerging-- the favored drugs, the influential individuals, the hackers and their motivations, the science chaos and the complexity of fractuals. This book will endure as a reminder of how modern cyberculture came about--a note to the future form an individual perceptive enough to grasp the profound effects of the cyber revolution.

This is a novel about a small band of friends who are part of a world wide psychedelic community loosely calling itself "the Tribe". Like many other forward-thinking people today, they are struggling to make the transition from cubicle-working consumers into beings who are more truly human.

The story that Lorenzo weaves is the tale of a young man caught between two worlds, the world of corporate America and that of people with a more psychedelic (soul manifesting) point of view. As things unfold, we experience his transformation from being a 29 year old “yuppie-geek” into a valuable member of the Tribe. The story begins in Palenque, Mexico and moves through Texas, Amsterdam, Viet Nam, and even on to Burning Man before reaching a surprising climax. Eventually, the hero of the story must choose between living in the corporate world or living free. At least, that is what he thinks until events sweep him along in an unforeseen direction.

A psychotropic hippie fable about the end of the world. A serialized online novel by Alan Rankin.