Drugs were everywhere in the 1960s, right? At first, it certainly seems that way. Writer Ken Kesey took a psychedelically painted school bus to travel across the United States and use LSD with his friends in 1964. This journey forms the basis of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Another proponent of LSD, Timothy Leary, encouraged people to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” during that decade. Depictions of hippies of that decade focus on their long hair, rock music, different lifestyles, and drug use.
According to these perceptions, it’s understandable if we think that drugs were everywhere in that decade. But we might not be entirely correct. Four percent of American adults had admitted that they had tried marijuana in a 1969 Gallup poll. In 1973, just a few years later, another poll found that twelve percent of adults had tried marijuana. Both polls can be found here.
In the 2000s, we have fewer hippies, so we should see fewer people using drugs, right? Again, that’s wrong. A 2013 Gallup poll has found that thirty-eight percent of American adults have admitted to trying marijuana. This number is considerably higher than the four percent who admitted to using the drug in 1969, the era with the supposedly heaviest drug use.
What gives? Could it be that literature and popular culture are trying to romanticize the drug use of the 1960s? Are they trying to paint a simplistic picture of the era as being all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll?
It seems that this is at least partly the case. It’s sometimes more colorful to depict things a certain way, and hippies (and their alleged drug use) are certainly colorful characters themselves.
It’s also easier to depict things in a certain way. Yes, the 1960s had its share of hippies who used drugs. It also had large numbers of workers, homemakers, soldiers and other “regular” people that might not get the publicity or notoriety that hippies receive.
All of this means we should look beyond the standard depictions of things and do a little investigation ourselves. Instead of accepting things, it might pay to question things every now and then. It could open our eyes to new ways of seeing things.
