The thing is that no substance is gonna be allowed on the market for long enough these days, to cause this 'summer-of-love-effect'.
There are and have been plenty of substances that could contribute, but once they start to become popular, then 'the sun' is gonna spend an article on it and the next week it's banned.

I would love another summer of love. Especially if it would include many girls dancing topless at popfestivals.

But i think for a permanent change you need more time than a summer. A movement that slowly but steadily gathers mass.
Maybe ayahuasca is an apropiate tool for this: it won't ever be a hype but in a period of several years it has the potential to touch many lives.

Another thing is maybe a bit more boring for many people on this forum, but nonetheless something that very well might work: meditation.
Tell all the bankers that meditation will allow them to get bigger bonusses, wich ofcourse is true since meditation is definately performance enhancing if only for it's harmless stress-relieving quality's, and slowly but with great certainty nonetheless, those bankers will become more empathic, more loving, caring and more responsible...almost like normal citizens. Even the ones who work at goldman sachs. Because that is what meditation does to people.

Seriously though-

When was the second summer of love...?

MDMA in the 80s, according to the original post. Personally, I don't think MDMA had the culture-consciousness effect that was seen in the 60s though.

oh, sorry I missed that! Thanks for relaying the info...

Isn't it a bit foolish to hope for something like the 60's to happen again?
I think, as a community, that's one of the last things we'd want... no?

Here is an orientation video ( from the film "Human Traffic" ):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6rahFZwCUA

Did XTC bring forth a 'summer of love' like in the 60's?

I think that the XTC generation is at least more hedonistic and self-centred than the LSD generation was at that time? The rave's XTC became associated with where fun, but as far as i know there never was a connection with any ideology.

When you look back at it, you have to say that the babyboom and economic devellopments of the 50's and 60's played a larger role than LSD.

-There are probably certain demographic preconditions nessecary for a 'summer of love': Old people are most of the time more conservative and less revolutionary minded.
-Secondly there has to be a period of economic abundance instead of crisis: only when basic needs are not too big an issue, people will start asking questions about the meaning of it all.
-Thirdly, political leadership will have to be questioned, not just by a small group but broadly among the general population.

That last thing certainly seems to be the case everywhere today.
But i think that both the current economic situationa as well as the current demographic situation aren't a likely base for a new summer of love.

Moreover the way society is organised today does not allow for the same sort of changes to take place today.

If you want a new summer of love to happen, then you'd better start spreading the word about ayahuasca's healing potential. Ayahuasca will never become a party-drug like MDMA and it also isn't likely going to be used as massively as LSD was in the 60's. But if only there would be a certain percentage of the intelectual and cultural elite's of our society's that has ever had experience with ayahuasca, then ayahuasca can have a simmilar or probably even a larger impact as LSD on our culture.

OK, let's just ignore i said all that and make this summer a true summer of love.............

haha thats the spirit... There was the wheel, then "We The People", and now the internet. the generations born from the ninties on up have almost unlimited information at, literally, their fingertips. the internet is a huge inhibitor for thinking and making inferences. the more of this and the more and more they question. the summer of love is coming this summer to a city near you.

I still think mushrooms can do it and are a better candidate than ayahuasca..simply becasue of availability. Mushrooms and ayahuasca are about the 2 best entheogens there is IMO..along with changa/DMT.

Mescaline is def up there..but I cant see it becomming widely available like that..mushrooms and ayahuasca personally take me to the core of it all..mescaline is very empathic..but so are mushrooms.

New friends were introduced to the love that the spice brings just recently, and they will be journeying this summer. This is the best contribution which my friends can make. I personally don't do illegal things so I would not be able to participate directly, but those braver than I will be leading the way this summer. Good things will happen for those that use entheogens to their fullest potential!

As for myself, much insight meditation this summer. Perhaps stream entry. That would in and of itself be an element of a summer of love!

I like to give mushrooms to people as gifts so that they too can experience the awakening of being turned on..il be doing as much as I can this summer..and taking certain people aside to show them what the full on real deal is like..

I seem to end up telling every person I meet about ayawaska after about an hour of conversation. I'm surprised how much it lights up some people's faces, people who have never done anything before. I was speaking to a psychologist who has zero experience with substances (other than alcohol, tobacco, caffeine) about it recently and she was eager to experience it. She had never heard anything about the history of psychedelic research in her field. Should Maps or CEL etc be contacting and educating them?

I wonder if these people ever will try it though... I'm certainly not going to risk having someone I don't know very well freaking out in my home. I'm sceptical that ayawaska could become widespread enough to cause change. The puking bit puts people off too I think. I think most people who seek out ayawaska are desperate, and that is why they find her. Only hippies seek her out out of curiosity.

Of course some people are not so open-minded, such as a clinical psychiatrist I met at a party who was very anti-psychedelics, despite knowing nothing about them. She'd already made up her mind. Drugs are bad m'kay. Unless they're the ones she's prescribing.

There's also the danger that telling these sorts of people about entheogens may lead to those who align with the establishment pressing for more control to stop use from spreading? Hence why I prefer the idea of the party-drug route, to explode use before the establishment has time to react. Loads of people got to try legal highs like meph before it became illegal... imagine if all these people had been 'spiritually awakened' instead? That could be enough people to change the course of a generation.

I still think we need a recreational psychedelic to open people up to the idea of aya and cacti. Weed is not a good 'gateway'. Actually I think it's a gatekeeper, putting people off other psychedelics. Similarly shrooms puts off many of the people brave enough to try them, whereas I'm sure many of these people would enjoy mescalito.

It's always amusing how individual these responses are.

For me, there is little empathogenic about mescaline. It sharpens all of my perceptions (and my thinking, for that matter) then, at larger doses, everything burst into a feast of the soul. But I remain, to a large extent, an observer in the midst of all the marvels.

Psilocybin in small doses makes me feel in love with everything. And even at larger doses, I feel much more emotionally connected to the visions than with mescaline. I find psilocybin humbling and yet comforting, a much stronger empathogen than mescalin.