“Let me tell you about the first trip.”
I still remember those words, and that exact moment in 2008 when Travis Ashbrook, a founding member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love––a group of acid evangelists who ran one of the largest drug cartels of the 1960s and 1970s––agreed to tell me his story. After months of detective work, I was finally prying open a secret, stranger-than-fiction chapter of American history.
We were eating fish tacos on the San Clemente Pier, and Ashbrook, who had long, Gandalf-like hair, a bushy mustache, and wore dark sunglasses, was referring not to discovering LSD but to his 1968 hash-smuggling odyssey from California to Kandahar, Afghanistan (which decades later became the birthplace of the Taliban). Time, Ashbrook noted, was not on my side.
“We’re getting old, and a lot of us are dead,” he told me, removing his shades and looking me in the eye. “If we don’t talk to you now, nobody will ever know what we really did.”
Ashbrook was a big player in the Brotherhood. He once orchestrated the sailing of a private yacht from a marina in the Caribbean to the port of Manzanillo, Mexico, and finally on to Maui. Stashed inside the ship: a massive haul of Mexican marijuana buds, the seeds of which, once planted in Hawaiian soil, became the legendary “Maui Wowie.”
Ashbrook seemed wary about meeting closer to home—for reasons that would soon become clear just a few months later, when he was sentenced, at age 63, to a year in jail for illegally growing marijuana in his backyard. Meanwhile, his warning was more prescient than I could have known—getting the surviving members of the Brotherhood to share their stories would take me years, and none of them were getting any younger.
As a cub reporter at OC Weekly, the now-defunct alt-weekly magazine where I had gotten my start in journalism, the Brotherhood was an almost mythical group. Their name constantly came up among numerous longtime denizens of the artsy beachside enclave of Laguna Beach, who, through the fog of psychedelics, fondly recalled a three-day Christmas rock concert in 1970 during which a small plane flying overhead dropped thousands of tabs of acid on the crowd.
The stunt had been organized, the story went, by a group called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a mysterious “church” of surfers and ex-hoodlums connected to LSD advocate Timothy Leary of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” fame. The Brotherhood had their own storefront in Laguna called Mystic Arts World, where they distributed the most infamous acid of the 1960s—“orange sunshine,” an LSD pill whose disciples included John Lennon and a young Steve Jobs.
Two years after the concert, the Brotherhood was dubbed the “Hippie Mafia” by Rolling Stone, after a task force led by D.E.A. agents busted the cartel––but not before they helped bust Leary out of prison and smuggled him to Algeria with the help of the Black Panthers and the Weathermen. The brotherhood was subjected to a flurry of mass arrests in Hawaii, Oregon, and California that constituted the first skirmish in President Nixon’s brand-new “war on drugs.” Only one disgruntled Brotherhood member testified at the trial, and it took the feds years—and in some cases decades—to track down many of its defendants.
Half a century later, despite the Brotherhood’s legendary status in America’s counterculture and its integral role in spawning Nixon’s war on drugs, the inside story had never been told. Specifically, the world still didn’t know the story of John Griggs, who founded the Brotherhood but has consistently been overshadowed by Leary over the years––even though Leary considered Griggs his guru. Though Leary may have been the face of the movement, it was Griggs who was its beating heart. But John Griggs died of an accidental overdose at the group’s teepee-strewn commune near Palm Springs in 1969, at the age of 26.
Tracking down surviving Brotherhood members such as Ashbrook wasn’t easy. “Don’t believe anyone who says they were there,” warned Jimmy Otto, who, in the 1960s, provided an office for the Brotherhood above his Laguna Beach record shop, Sound Spectrum, and was once arrested trying to flush marijuana down the toilet. “If you were there, you don’t remember, and if you remember … you weren’t really there,” he helpfully explained.
In addition to the difficulty of finding and confirming credible subjects, getting to these sources was an obstacle in and of itself. I remember using a 1972 wanted poster with photos of Brotherhood members that included their full names and birthdates to track some of them down. But many were either dead or too ill to talk, living under different names, had disappeared underground, or were casualties of their acid use––either homeless or hermits.
One of the sources I did manage to get on record, Eddie Padilla––who escaped from a notorious prison in Peru in 1978, after four years behind bars, had a fearsome reputation as an enforcer, and was still ripped when I spoke to him at age 64––initially blew off my interview requests. But after a few months of persistence, he eventually softened and let me spend three days getting his violence-filled biography. And despite his menacing reputation, it turned out that he had become an addiction counselor living in the Napa Valley.
Tracing the Brotherhood’s tracks also took me to Maui, where I met a Buddhist monk and hermit who lived on a remote slope of the Haleakala volcano. The monk gave me some meditation music to deliver to his friend and fellow Maui resident Richard Alpert, otherwise known as Ram Dass, Leary’s Harvard psychology colleague.
Dass, who died in 2019, agreed to meet me and share his take on the Brotherhood. As someone who saw the potential dangers of LSD early on, Dass thought Griggs to be a lunatic and Leary and the Brotherhood’s mission to “turn on” the world a naïve folly.
Fifteen years ago, following five years spent interviewing the surviving Brotherhood members and the authorities who chased them, I published my book about the group, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World. The book exploded like a literary hand grenade among its protagonists, some of whom hadn’t spoken to each other in decades and were now happily reconnecting. Others, upon seeing the Brotherhood’s secret history now exposed in print, clearly resented the attention. A few even showed up at my book readings to heckle me for sensationalizing their spiritually pure endeavors.
Shortly before the book’s publication, in 2010, Brenice Smith, the only founding Brotherhood of Eternal Love member who had never been caught by the cops, flew back to California from Nepal, where he’d been hiding out at a Buddhist monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas since the 1970s. Police arrested him at the airport on ancient smuggling charges. After a few months behind bars in Orange County, during which time he refused to tell the cops anything, they let him go. After being introduced by Padilla’s wife, who was also Smith’s niece, I took him out to lunch near the county jail.
“Brennie,” as Smith was better known, hadn’t been back to California since Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown was governor (the first time) and still dating the country-rock singer Linda Ronstadt. The orange groves of Brennie’s youth had been swallowed up by freeways and mini-malls, and he couldn’t wait to leave.
Before he boarded his flight to Kathmandu, I asked Brennie if, despite the heavy price he and his friends had paid as inmates or fugitives, the Brotherhood had succeeded in its dream of a more enlightened world, now that most of what the group stood for—peace, love, and psychedelics—were mainstream.
“We wanted everyone to be happy and free and not as society conditioned you to want to be,” he answered. “Basically, we loved everyone and wanted everyone to find love and happiness. We wanted to change the world, but instead … it changed us. It was an illusion.”
Nicholas Schou is a Santa Barbara–based journalist and the former editor of OC Weekly
