Summer Of Love Flashback: How Marijuana Gained Acceptance

It’s been 50 years since the fabled Summer of Love in San Francisco. The City by the Bay was the epicenter of a countercultural uprising fueled by cannabis and LSD, which happened so vividly and with such intensity that it generated worldwide attention.

Although the two psychoactive substances were closely linked during the social tumult loosely known as “the Sixties,” LSD never achieved the widespread social acceptance as marijuana. Once confined to America’s lower socioeconomic strata, the illicit weed smoked by marginalized Mexicans and African-Americans jumped its racial boundaries and suddenly found favor among white middle class youth.

The serrated marijuana leaf would become a totem of rebellion, a badge of anti-authoritarian identity during the 1960s, when cannabis first emerged as a defining force in a culture war that has never ceased. Nearly everything was being questioned, and most things tried in an orgy of experiment that shook the nation at its roots. Marijuana was an integral part of that social experiment… read more >