Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man. "Two Cheers For The Hippies" .Part Two by Dave Jaffe.

  Two Cheers For The Hippies: Part Two by Dave Jaffe.




        The hippies produced new things to get their views out. So-called 'underground papers' written by hippies surfaced all over the United States and Canada. Singers like the Beatles and Bob Dylan were already popular when the hippies appeared. Then in the mid-1960's, new groups like The Byrds, The Grateful Dead, Mock Duck, The Doors, The Jefferson Airplane, The Mamas And The Papas and Big Brother And The Holding Company popped up to sing and create new music for this new demographic.
    Some of the mainstream media launched attacks on hippies. They headlines and front paged stories on the danger of L.S.D. and also the dirt that hippies lived in. L.S.D. was a dangerous drug. "I never saw anybody get better using L.S.D.," said Tom Clark, a British-born immigrant to Canada in the mid-1960's. "Yet I sure saw some people's lives get worse." Yet at the same time that some papers were demonizing L.S.D. users, over 20,000 Canadians were dying every year from smoking cigarettes. Another 6,000 to 10,000 were facing early death by drinking alcohol.
   While some Canadian papers talked about the dirt that hippies lived in, they said nothing about the terrible living conditions of First Nations people. Hypocrisy ran rampant when some Canadians talked about hippies.
    Books on the hippies rolled out of the publishing houses. Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" became a best seller. Pierre Berton's "The Smug Minority" and Nicholas Von Hoffman's "We Are The Children Our Parents Warned Us Against' were read by many thousands of people.
       It was in some ways a magical moment. A consumer driven world was being slowly undercut by a group of youngsters who didn't want to join in the rat race. Yet all of this soon ended. Hard core progressives had never liked the hippies. "I had no time for the hippies," said the late Sandy Cameron who was a Vancouver-based activist. Yet police and governments were a far more threat. Police arrested dope smoking hippies and threw many of them into prison after bringing these young people before tough judges. Police often harassed sellers of underground papers and charged them with selling obscene material.
    "I would spend sometimes a whole day in court rooms," the publisher  of Vancouver-based "The Georgia Straight" Dan McLeod said recalling days when he first started publishing the paper.