While Laguna's psychedelic history is full of intrigue, this episode of the Plant Medicine Channel explores a different revolution - the medicinal one.
Tune in Turn on. You’ll hear it again and again on broadcasts from this radio station – because it’s our tagline. But the source of that tag, “Turn on, tune in and drop out,” was Timothy Leary’s mantra, the former Harvard professor, psychologist and author whose vision became the reality of a secret society of mystic surfers, the Laguna Beach based Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Founded on the shared belief in LSD’s transformative effects, they literally provided the fuel for the psychedelic revolution, producing what would become the most popular brand of LSD in history – Orange Sunshine. The Timothy Leary-approved commune-turned-acid cult began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving surfers in Laguna Beach. But after they discovered the recently-banned-in-California psychedelic LSD, they formed a legally registered church headquartered at Mystic Arts World, a 1960s Laguna Beach emporium, bookstore, and gallery on Pacific Coast Highway where they started selling countercultural paraphernalia that they brought back from surfing safaris from across the world. By the end of the decade, they became sidetracked into a drug smuggling operation, selling hashish, Hawaiian pot (“Maui Wowie”), and eventually cocaine, which they snuck into Laguna Beach in secret compartments inside surfboards and Volkswagen minibuses driven across the border. The Brotherhood’s most legendary contribution to the drug scene was homemade: Orange Sunshine, the group’s nickname for their trademark, highly potent, orange-colored acid tablet which was passed out by the handfuls to communes, at Grateful Dead concerts, and at love-ins up and down the coast of California and beyond. Their goal was to psychedelicize the world and they often created stunts and outwitted the police in their efforts to do so. Perhaps their most famous antic took place at a massive rock festival in Laguna Beach called the Christmas Happening, where they basically bombed Laguna canyon with LSD by dropping thousands of Orange Sunshine tablets from a cargo plane to an unsuspecting crowd of 25,000 people. OC Weekly reporter Nicholas Schou spent four years uncovering the brotherhood's surreal, largely unknown story, in his book, Orange Sunshine and an earlier documentary with the same name – one that took filmmaker William Kirkley 10 years to make, captures the twist of fate that underpinned the Brotherhoods’ nearly 20-year outlaw movement for cultural change. There was definitely more to the story than world peace on LSD. The film was screened a while back at the Rivian theater and you can watch it on Netflix. But that was then, and this is now, and while Laguna’s psychedelic history is full of mischief and intrigue, we aren’t here to talk about that kind of psychedelic revolution. We’re here to talk about the medicinal one, to discuss everything plant medicine, the medicinal and holistic properties of cannabis, mushrooms, flowers, vines, healing plants that grow in nature, what their potential effects are for humans and pets, and the safest way to use them.
