Original subtitles

John Griggs heard about this

movie producer up in LA that had a stash of LSD.

It was, like, $35 to $50 a hit

and that was just more than anybody could afford.

John decided him and his friends were gonna

rob the house where the LSD was in Hollywood.

They took guns and went up there

and held this guy up and took his LSD.

And they go into Orange County and they took it,

and they had deep, spiritual revelations.

They took a lot.

- When John took LSD,

it totally turned him around.

Actually, his first time,

he just started running and running.

And he said he just had to get home

to tell me how much he loved me.

By the time he got home,

it was about three in the morning.

He was completely out of breath

and just, his eyes were wide and crazy.

He just had to tell me how much love he was feeling.

It just pumped and flowed through him

and he said he could feel divinity flowin' through him

as he ran, you know, and he had been going totally

in the wrong direction in life.

You hadn't heard any stories like this before, you know?

It just, this was a new one, you know?

This was a new one for planet Earth, you know?

The wake-up call.

LSD was the kind of thing that changed people,

one at a time, individually.

I graduated from high school in 1962.

I went to college,

thought I would be a businessman of some kind

and then LSD came along while I was in college

and that changed everything.

That changed everything.

I started taking philosophy classes

and classes on religion.

- Michael was John's friend.

Psychedelics is what brought them together.

They became tripping buddies.

I knew there was something else

in this whole acid experience that I needed

to understand more and more and more.

* When I die and they let me to rest

* Gonna go to the place that's the best *

I started smuggling pot in, actually in '64,

before I ever took psychedelics.

At that time I was building surfboards

at a surfboard shop in Laguna Canyon,

but I also supplemented my income

by dealing a little weed.

If you knew us, we were polimen, spiritual warriors.

If you didn't know us, we were a bunch of drug dealers.

You know, we were both.

The international business

and the risks that we took.

Not only risks of getting locked up indefinitely

in some foreign country where they just

throw the key away and forget you're there,

but there was people killed in those days

for possession of hash

and there we were, you know,

smuggling LSD and hash and marijuana.

So, we could have easily been executed

and we knew it, and we did it anyway.

We were rolling through tons of karma,

taking that much acid, smuggling and all that.

We were doing things nobody else could do.

Other people try to do that and they died

or ended up in jail.

We had the power to do stuff

and we did it and we knew it and it worked.

* When you die

* He's gonna recommend you to the spirit in the sky

* Going to recommend you to the spirit in the sky

* That's where you gonna go when you die

* When you die and they lay you to rest

* You're gonna go to the place that's the best *

- 1960, I was 15.

Johnny Grigg's group from Anaheim was sitting

in their designated area on the beach

and Garden Grove was over here, you know?

Johnny turned around and he just stared at me

for a real long time and it penetrated me.

That was it, that was just it for me.

You know they say it's love at first sight

or it's a lightning bolt or something.

That is what happened to me.

My girlfriend's all warned me about him, you know?

That he was kind of a little bit of a troublemaker.

Johnny asked me if I would go out with him

and I had known for months and months

and been already in love with him.

When he kissed me I was so shocked,

because he seemed so timid

and he was almost afraid.

He says, "I was so nervous, you know,

"'cause I had everything banking on that kiss, you know."

It was like, you know, if it wasn't then,

it wasn't gonna happen, you know.

And that was it.

From that kiss on.

* I need your love

* I need your love so badly

* Now since I've learned you wanted

* No one else around me

* Me, your love, and I'm counting on it all *

Johnny went to Brigham Young University.

He had a scholarship in wrestling there.

When he came back in May, I got pregnant.

I was my 17th birthday; my first time out.

Happy birthday!

My parents and John's parents took us to Las Vegas

because they had to sign for me 'cause I was only 17

and we got married there.

We were totally in love so it didn't matter.

Johnny and I bought a house in Fountain Valley

with our little family.

It was a cul-de-sac.

My kids could go to school.

I thought it was everything I wanted in life.

Well, I was just against all drugs, you know?

I just never did a drug.

I never smoked pot or did anything.

John was taking LSD and he was doing it in my house

and I thought it was a little crazy, but I was young.

Johnny would select a few of his close friends

that he wanted to experience that and who were open.

They were tripping inside

and then they went out into nature

to the beaches, and surfing

and John was turning on 24/7

and for about nine months before

they decided I needed to join the club.

Him and his friends took me out,

took me down, maybe, you know, with breakfast;

scrambled eggs and it was in the orange juice.

Man, the whole universe came down on me.

I experienced deep within and I didn't want this

two-story Fountain Valley house

that I thought was everything I wanted in life, you know?

This little stray piece of land here and fit in

and that night, I didn't want any of it, you know?

I didn't want any of it.

I just wanted to move to the country

and be my own special self whatever that was.

Well, the experiences you have when you take LSD

is a, is a sense of being in communion

with powers greater than yourself

and intelligence which far outstretch the human mind

and energies which are very ancient.

- Johnny have read this article

in Life Magazine about these Harvard professors

who were experimenting with LSD.

- Our aim, like the aims

of any religious group just beginning,

is to transform American society.

I'm sure many of your viewers know

that American today is an insane asylum.

The American people are completely hung up

on material acquisition, on power, on war-making,

it's an insane asylum over here.

And it's our goal to lift the spiritual level

of the American people.

We're gonna try to bring about a religious renaissance

and a spiritual revolution.

Timothy Leary was very much a spiritual being.

He had written a Tao Te Ching,

and Psychedelic Experience.

He was trippin'.

You know, I mean this is the head honcho, the high priest.

Johnny went to Millbrook and met him,

and then they talked,

and Johnny brought back books and information,

and then we had more printed.

We had lived in Fountain Valley 'bout 10 months to a year

and you know we had a down payment

and making our payments on this thing, you know.

And I just walked up to the main office,

and I gave him my keys and I told him

we were giving the house back.

They said, "What, we can't do that."

I said, "Yeah we can, we don't want it.

"It's yours, sell it, resell it, we don't want it."

We realized that we were

a group of sort of bonded people

and we found this old church in Modjeska Canyon;

beautiful, beautiful, beautiful little canyon

We moved to Modjeska Canyon as a group

from our individual dwellings in Anaheim,

Long Beach, and Garden Grove.

The first time I went to Modjeska Canyon

it felt spiritual.

It felt religious in a way.

The goal of the group at that time

was your personal enlightenment, changing yourself.

You know, we all started reading spiritual books

and philosophies.

Most of us didn't know anything among,

I was raised pretty much without religion.

I was pretty much an atheist,

'til I started taking psychedelics.

In the beginning we relied a lot on holy men,

like Yogananda Ramakrishna and Ram Dass.

We had a Zen master for a while.

You know, we searched around to find

people that could explain the mystery to us.

* The seed doesn't fall

Each time we took LSD

we woke up a little bit more, and a little bit more,

and we surrendered to that process and to that light.

John Griggs' dream was to give LSD

to everybody, change the world.

Hopefully everybody can see what we were seeing.

There was always this tension in the world

that just seemed like would probably go away

if everybody took a dose of acid, is what we thought.

That's when we decided to form a church.

We had one of our meetings, one of our,

I think it was a Wednesday night meeting,

and John was trying to come up

with a name for the group.

Dwight Buckley said something

like "The Brotherhood".

And somebody said "Well, the Brotherhood of what?"

And then Chuck Mendell said...

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love...

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and it stuck.

* We are the brothers here

* And they can't take that away *

The idea was that each one of those, say 12 people

would go out and have 10 or 12 people,

and show them how this, how this works.

Everybody you know, go out and tell everybody,

your workplace, your school, your family, anybody.

Get 'em to take LSD with you.

- The obvious thing was,

we need to know how to make as much acid

and get it to as many people as we possibly can.

* I love it

We felt it was our duty to turn the world on.

We really, really, truly believe that it is our mission

We were called upon to do this.

it felt like that to all of us.

we said, "this is something, this is what I have to do."

LSD was much more expensive then.

Say, that's hence where all the hash scams

and the weed scams came through.

- Almost everyone

was doing a scam.

By a scam, we mean an operation,

some sort of smuggling operation.

When it came down to the real business

of making this into a big business,

I was the guy to do that.

Michael started working very closely with Johnny,

was his kind of right-hand man

- John and I were best friends.

That's how I became his partner.

I think like he does.

I was one of the ground-floor investors

in a scam where we were a movie company.

In those days, everything was big, you know.

And only had film canisters and the idea was

to fill the film canisters with LSD,

and you can't open them or you expose the film.

* I feel this rust I'm in so bad *

- I was the hash guy.

Hash was my thing.

Travis inspired me because he was always a go-getter,

and he still is to this day.

Perales used to buy weed in Tijuana,

walk it up to the border, leave it,

and go through Tijuana, go and pick it up and drive it home.

And he did that when he was 17 years old.

* I can't get your love, I can't get affection *

Ron, my older brother is a pretty smart guy,

engineer kind of mind, you know.

He can build things, design things.

He's very handy.

You know they always called me Poindexter,

because I am really smart,

but book smart.

I'm street-stupid.

You can ask Travis, he'll tell you.

I took on the building of the vehicles kind of as a job,

but, it was real interesting

to figure out where to put the hash.

- Carol was the queen mother,

and all the other wives looked to Carol.

She was just like all of us looked to John.

- It was always 50-50.

The women, we all did our share.

We worked hard.

Women made everything legitimate.

You wanted a woman in the car with you, you know,

not a couple of shady looking guys.

* I need you girl by my side

John was the magician.

He made it happen.

We would get a huge load of something,

and he would be instrumental

in making sure it got to York,

and who it went out to,

and who it hooked up to,

and he was a business man, kind of.

Johnny was sort of the hub,

and this group was growing around him.

I found in most cases

people that you're going to dangerous things with

and break the law,

you better be close friends.

You better be sure that you got each other's back.

You know, a goal was not the drug business,

it just morphed into this, you know,

it went from a group,

a handful of guys seeking spiritual enlightenment,

to next thing you know, we were smuggling.

First it started off small things,

but then the loads kept getting bigger, bigger,

which was more revenue.

The money for the LSD all went back in

to make more to make it cheaper,

give it away for almost nothing.

People on the east coast pay like five times more money

than we do on the west coast for marijuana,

so however you get it back there,

you can make quite a bit of money.

Used to be able to go to the airport

and say, "Hi my name is" whatever name you want.

Go on a one way ticket, take a large suitcase,

fill it with weed.

Check it into baggage on the airplane, fly it to New York.

You could do that.

At this time, you could get on a plane anywhere,

and whatever you had on your body was fine.

All the Afghani hash was known as Primo, Afghani Primo.

One of my reasons for exploring the hash business

was I loved it so much,

but it was so expensive.

I mean you pretty much had to be a dealer

to be able to afford to use it,

so I wanted to make it cheaper.

I just started doing a little research

on where they had hash,

figured it out and decided to go do a...

I got Ricky Bevells to go with me

and we flew to Europe,

clean cut, corduroy sport jackets, and short hair.

We decided we'd go to Germany

and buy a car, and drive to Nepal.

Since we both had hid cars with door panels

from Mexico and everything,

we thought okay, well we'll get a car,

score and fill it up, and ship it home.

We had no idea where we were going,

or what we were going to encounter.

We picked up a couple hippies that were hitchhiking.

It was a guy and a girl.

So, we started smoking with these hippies,

and one thing came to another,

and they figured out we were coming there

to get some hash.

So the guys says, "You know what, man?"

He says, "You wanna go to Afghanistan."

And I said, "Where the heck, where's that?"

I had never heard of that.

He says, "They got the best hash in the world there,

"and it's only four dollars a kilo."

I said, "When do we leave, man?"

And the next morning, man, we headed for Afghanistan.

We were very young,

and not very fearful of hardly anything, actually.

We weren't two kids,

like you think of a 19 year old and a 20 year old.

It was different than that,

because we had been weekly

tapping into this self that is eternal.

And we knew that.

So, we were like, old souls in young bodies

going over to do this deed.

- When we first got there,

we were standing in line at this fruit stand

to buy some fruit,

when this guy comes walking across the square,

looking right at us.

And I see kind of a guy in a turban, you know,

and he comes right up to us and goes,

"Would you guys like to buy some fine Afghan shit?"

I said, "What kind of shit you got, man?"

He said, "Well, I got cocaine, hashish,

"morphine, opium."

I go, "Well, that hash sounds good."

We'd gone on this trip originally

planning on trying to get 10 kilos.

22 pounds, that was our goal.

We ended up buying 50 kilos from these guys.

This is Ayatoolah and Nazareem, two po-ki brothers.

So, we had all this hash,

We were gonna figure out, how are we gonna get this home?

So, we started going to the bazaar,

looking at antiques and stuff.

And things were so ridiculously cheap.

We found all these beautiful antique musical instruments,

drums, and like tablas,

and stringed instruments like tambouras.

We just bought a bunch of it and we packed it with hash.

You could pack the neck.

You could line the body of it.

We saw it in the news paper,

that they had executed a Canadian guy

for possession of a very small amount of hash.

So, we didn't realize we were risking our lives.

- So, I'm sitting out in Pomona.

Travis and Rick, he called me from Europe.

And they proceed to tell me that they sent me a shipment,

and the hash is in it and it's coming,

and I have to go pick it up from the LA Customs.

Why'd they send it to me?

I didn't tell them they could send that to me.

Why the fuck did they send that to me?

Why didn't they send it to themself.

So, I go to the airport, pick this up.

Well, they had sent animal skins

with all the instruments that they packed the hash into.

They hassled me about the skins.

They said, "You can't import these skins.

"What are you guys doin'?"

And I'm standing there with these two customs agents

for hours when they've got this stuff all over the floor.

It wasn't over till it was over.

So, until Ron had cleared it, we were all ahead.

I was worried about my brother getting busted.

Ron was worried about getting busted.

Trav was probably worried that we'd lose everything.

And the one guy picks up the one wooden tabla,

the drum, and he says, "This thing's heavy.

"He says, it must be solid wood."

And other customs agents picks up another one,

and said, "Yeah, and I suppose this is solid metal."

And they're looking at each other.

And I'm just standing there.

They said, okay, you can go.

So, we showed up with 88 pounds of hash

that nobody even knew that hash was like that.

It was so good, so different

than anything we'd ever seen before.

There's, it's the best hash in the world.

I'm in Ann Arbor at a college commune,

and I walk in,

and this wonderful aroma wharfs past me,

and it was almost like a moment, you know,

that I really, to this day,

I mean how many years ago was that?

45 or something, 50 years ago,

and I'm still thinking of when I think of it.

It really is a moment of wow.

And I said, "This stuff's really good.

"Where'd you get it?"

And he said,

"These people called The Brotherhood bring it in."

And I said, "There's people called The Brotherhood?"

And I said, "Well, that sounds cool."

People were associating this hash

from Afghanistan with the Brotherhood,

because we were the ones that had it.

And the name Brotherhood probably went along with it.

It was dealt in pounds.

Then it was dealt in ounces.

Then it was dealt in grams, you know.

- Everybody had to have some,

and then of course that just set everyone to thinking,

we can do this, you know?

John and I had started to pursue the idea of providing

massive amounts of LSD, as much acid as we could.

We went through a number phases

where we got different types of LSD.

There was 7th Chakra Lavendar, Blue Levis.

There was Red Tab.

Ram Dass, who was Richard Alpert's said,

"You guys need a center.

"You need a place to explain how you're

"surviving."

Because now we're selling acid.

* Pack too much baby

* Say you'll be my girl

So, we went to Laguna Beach.

It was an artist colony.

It was the most liberal of places in Orange County.

Who doesn't like the beach?

* Back again let me in

* The war is over where you been *

Johnny and I started immediately talking

that a bookstore,

a metaphysical bookstore,

that's what we were gonna do.

And we then found the place on Pacific Coast Highway

that was just way bigger than a bookstore place,

but it looked perfect

and the whole thing just expanded out like,

"Well, hell let's

"put a bookstore here and other stores there."

It became a bigger vision.

And that way we could be creative and

more hide what we were doing.

* Walk right by the old news baby *

A clothing store, handmade clothing,

there was a bead store, art gallery,

a health food juice bar,

and we called it Mystic Arts World.

And it was a hit,

and the place started making money from day one.

* Hey hey hey hey

* No no no no

The Los Angeles Times said

that, "Mystic Arts World was the finest gallery

"in southern California."

There was nothing like it around.

There has never been anything like it around.

It was a psychedelic emporium.

Mystic Arts became the center

for southern California

for the hippie movement,

and the psychedelic movement,

the spiritual movement,

and Laguna became the town everyone flocked to.

It was like Haight Ashbury south.

And we ended calling the place Dodge City,

because of everybody was dealing pot,

and psychedelics, and just,

I mean, it became the place.

There was no law there, you know.

It was the wild west,

and a new frontier.

You know, it was our own community.

It was like the Shire,

this beautiful idyllic little weird community.

You could just go out on the street,

and you'd run into somebody you knew,

and have a conversation,

or go over to their house and smoke a joint with them,

or get some waves, go surfing.

It was all so relaxed and sort of utopia.

Johnny used to love to take acid and surf.

That was their whole thing.

That's what got 'em all goin'.

A lot of the surfers, they called it Christ in the curl.

You had surfers meeting with all the hippies

and everybody smoked weed.

Everybody took acid.

Everybody did.

Chuch Wendell had brought Mike Hynson

out to the canyon to meet us.

Mike Hynson was the best surfer

in the world, practically in the day,

and a movie star, kind of.

His story on black speech in San Diego once,

we're passing a joint back and forth,

both high on acid,

and Mike picked up his board,

and he jumps in the water with the joint still lit,

jumps into this wave,

catches it just perfect,

and he disappeared inside the curl,

and sitting on the beach, can't see him.

And all of a sudden he comes flying out

the back end of the wave kind of sitting cross-legged

on the back of the surfboard,

and hops off, grabs the surfboard,

and the joint is still lit.

He said, "That's how you're supposed to do it, brother."

You know, it was like, my God.

Selling psychedelics was a dharmic way to be.

It was a good way to make a living.

It was honest.

It was a good product.

It was wanted, you know.

The only problem is it was illegal.

- Because they made it illegal,

it produced commerce.

All the hippies can't be just smoking weed

and taking LSD.

Someone has to make the money.

Now there was bands.

There was health food stores.

There was record shops,

but the main commerce came from the LSD,

the marijuana, and the hashish.

From the smugglers to the ground dealer,

this started a commerce

that allowed the hippie movement to happen.

The movement

and the name of The Brotherhood

kept getting bigger and bigger.

And I think a lot of people realized that

we were gonna be a major influence

in the psychedelic world.

- I was an attorney.

I had been practicing for a number of years.

We were representing a lot of draft resisters at the time

and a lot of drug dealers at the time.

My basic view of the law was

anybody our government didn't like

couldn't be all bad.

So, we represented criminals.

We were very political ourselves,

very proud student activists.

I mean, I think the 60s was

the perfect storm in so many ways.

With all the background of people

just getting sick and tired of racism,

women wanting to be treated more equally

in society and they weren't.

It was during the Vietnam War.

You know, nobody wanted to go fight the war.

Nobody wanted to do that.

It was all about peace and love.

- You had the marches going on.

They know it was,

a lot of turmoil.

- Great steps forward often come

from a surprising stimulus.

Psychedelics was just the catalyst you drop into it,

and it all started to gel and come together.

People just said,

"We're not gonna put up with this anymore.

"This isn't right, and so we rebuild."

We were there for the Berkeley riots.

400 police officers moved skirmish lines

through the area.

My beautiful girls would run around topless,

and give the soldiers flowers,

and sometimes refreshments

that were laced with acid, of course.

There were times when we'd go out,

and this roadblock isn't there anymore.

All the guards are layin' on the lawns of the houses,

in their uniform,

with their stupid looking old bolt action rifles,

flowers in the stock,

and they're as loaded as they could be.

There was a time, particularly in southern California,

where word spread.

It was mostly mythology,

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love could take a tab of acid,

and with a little pair of gloves,

they'd put it on your doorknob.

They could put it in your drinking water.

They could put it everywhere,

and you didn't even know it had hit you

until you were stoned outta your mind,

and wondering, "Whoa!

"Why am I looking into the face of God all of a sudden?"

We were on a mission to change the world,

and we were doing it by supplying psychedelics

to help change people's thinking.

So, it was worth the risk.

- It began a year ago,

when to so-called free speech advocates,

who in truth have no appreciation for freedom,

were allowed to assault and humiliate

the symbol of law and order of policemen

on the campus.

What we were doing became political

because it influenced so many people.

This year, I will propose a drug control act,

to provide stricter penalties

for those who traffic in LSD,

and other dangerous drugs with our people.

The time has come to stop the sale

of slavery to the young.

The war on drugs was a war on us.

The war on drugs is a war on psychedelics,

things that they cannot control.

20,000 young people filled the canyon

outside the resort town of Laguna Beach.

They came by the thousands to sleep on the ground,

or in their cars and campers.

We were starting to realize

that more and more people shared the vision

that we'd had, which was great.

Think, "Oh, yeah, this is really good.

"You know, it's spreading.

"It's spreading like we were hoping it would."

Drugs are just an everyday part of life here.

It's a special day that it's really happy

and a lot of people and a lot of brotherhood.

- I had come to Laguna,

and I wanted to get more hash.

While I was there, I had met everyone,

and everyone was really nice,

but I was wondering, you know,

where's the Brotherhood?

Who's the Brotherhood?

You know, they were supposedly the people who,

who get this and I actually,

had kind of paid for that connection.

So, I wanted to, I wanted,

I didn't want to go through other people.

The rock lovers keep coming.

They leave their cars and walk.

The last of '66, '67, and into '68,

Laguna was like an anthill,

and just, just these hippy-types

just buzzin' around.

I'll never forget my first time

I actually parked there,

and I walked down at sunset.

It was about 7:00 at night,

and I looked out there,

and as far as you could see both ways,

there was more potheads down there smokin'

watchin' the sun goin' down cross-legged,

"Om...

"Om..."

And I'm just thinkin', "You know, nothing.

"I guess this is just a free wide open place,

"but this is bull.

"Marijuana's a felony.

"All these other drugs are felonies."

And I'm gonna,

I'm going to make it my business.

The orders of the police department at that time was,

we're gonna write as many tickets as we can write,

and we're gonna make as many arrests as you can.

That's all there is to it.

Well, we opened up the shop,

and people started coming from all around,

and hanging out on the sidewalk in front there,

and smoking pot and getting busted.

It just slowly sort of built up,

that notoriety,

which brought people like Purcell

to start trying to observe us more closely.

You know, from behind the bushes and stuff,

watching.

- By now, we had a reputation,

that The Brotherhood can move it,

you know, whatever it is.

If it's good, it's pure, we can move it.

The cops used to come in there,

trying to rouse people and bust people,

and it was just a big game of cops and robbers.

Neil Purcell pulls into Dodge City, you know,

and were smokin' the hooka at one of the hotels.

He came running in there all by himself,

"You're all under arrest!"

Somebody pushed him into the swimming pool

in his uniform,

and we grabbed the hooka and everybody left.

By the time he got out of the pool,

nobody was there.

He fucking hated us.

In those days, you know,

most people would really bow to authority's rule,

but we didn't.

We refused to behave,

or even to pretend to behave, we refused to.

You know, it was just like in your face,

"No, we're gonna be the way we are."

We were gettin' stoned, we were smokin' dope,

takin' acid, pursuing a spiritual life.

Everything grows organically.

You start selling acid to 10 people, then 100 people,

then thousands of people,

and pretty soon you have a demand.

These guys Nick, Sam, and Tim Scully made a bunch of acid.

It was the largest amount of acid

that was available for sale

that was real, real good, that we knew of, and so...

They wanted The Brotherhood to be the distributors

of the LSD.

Up until that point, the main distributors

were the Hells Angels.

We wanted the exclusive.

You don't want five people to have this.

You want one group to have it.

We saw something in each other,

Nick, and I, and Johnny.

And that was it, we were the guys.

So many miraculous things happened,

that made it possible to do the things we did.

It feels like there was divine intervention involved.

- They came up with these bags,

these old bags of yellow tabs,

and orange tabs,

and blue tabs.

For some reason, everyone liked the orange ones.

We had it all in the trunk of this car,

and turned on the radio,

and there was Back on the Street Again,

by the Sunshine Company.

And they named 'em Orange Sunshine.

It became, like overnight famous.

I remember flying back east with a small duffle bag

that had baggies of Orange Sunshine.

And you know, it'd just take five hours

to get it from the west coast and it'd be on the east coast

as fast as the plane lands,

and pretty soon the acid hits the street that night.

Chuck Scott, he was kind of the one

that got the New York Market established for us.

And we had people in Laguna Beach

that sold a lot of acid on the west coast.

* What'd you take

* Orange Sunshine

* Do you want more

* Yeah yeah

- Orange Sunshine

became synonymous with The Brotherhood.

It became a household name damn quick.

Sunshine was far more popular

than say, Windowpane, Purple Haze,

or other things that were around.

The Grateful Dead was always in love

with The Brotherhood,

because although their music was great,

it was even greater with Orange Sunshine.

People in Hollywood were interested.

People came from all over.

- Acid, Sunshine?

It was happening in San Francisco.

It was happening in Amsterdam,

in England, and Germany.

The kids, all over the world,

got this LSD at the same time.

Paul, how often have you taken LSD?

- About four times.

Where did you get it from?

- Oh, you know, I mean,

if I was to say where I got it from,

you know it's illegal and everything,

it's silly to say then.

It was in every city there was,

and it had a name,

and you know, the Orange Sunshine.

I took some acid,

and they were these little orange pills.

- Were they barrel-shaped?

Uh, yes.

Okay, right, you did some Orange Sunshine, Peter.

We eclipsed everything.

You know, we were the Coca-Cola of LSD.

I never sold LSD or smuggled it to make money.

Ever, I can honestly say that.

Most of us said, "Hey, the LSD should be free."

That was John's dream.

John's dream was everybody did LSD for free.

He said it should be in gum machines on the corner.

When more money came in, it didn't matter to us.

The money just afforded us to try and make more acid.

Nobody was living high on the hog,

and had Cadillacs or fancy cars.

I mean, I drove my old pickup.

People maintained the same spiritual values.

We just got bigger and we just,

it made the machine grow in a organic way.

We made a lot of LSD, a whole lot of it.

At that point, you could feel the police presence,

snooping around and asking questions,

and watching people.

When you add the element of what we're doing

is very, very risky.

Don't forget the fear part,

and the prayers of "I hope we don't get caught doin' this,

"'cause this isn't...

"This isn't a platinum record we're doing here.

"This is something that could send you to jail forever."

- Cops, or narcs,

or whoever they who were would sit out in their cars

and just watch people coming in and going out.

Trying to figure who's who,

and hook who up to what and...

Oh good luck.

- The Brotherhood was known more

as a mystical organization.

There were a lot of people that said,

"It doesn't really exist, It's not real."

I never allowed my picture taken,

so people might know my name,

but they wouldn't know what I looked like.

- After my first couple,

my first trip or two to Afghanistan,

I decided we should probably start getting fake ID.

And, it was really easy in those days.

We had blank Social Security cards,

so you could fill in a number

on the Social Security card if you want.

And what you do with the birth certificate,

is you could erase everything on the birth certificate

and put in other numbers and make a copy of it,

and then kind of make it official.

Put a stamp in there and then emboss it,

and it worked.

The idea was to travel

under a fictitious name

in case something happened in a foreign country,

and you could pay your way out over there,

so it wouldn't reverberate back here

and get us in trouble here.

We were using the names of dead people

and going and getting passports.

I had four passports of my own and three fakes.

- I can remember going up to LA

to the Passport Bureau one time,

and I changed my appearance.

I got some glasses that were just plain glass though,

stage glasses, and changed my hair.

I went in there and said, "I need an expedited passport,

"I'm leaving tomorrow."

For an extra 20 bucks, man.

"Okay", walked out with a passport,

right then, same day.

Went out, went to a hotel room,

changed my appearance, completely.

Went back the same day,

went in a different cube,

got in a different line,

and got another passport,

in the same office in the same day,

under two different IDs.

No computers,

there was not cross-referencing.

- So, we were able to function

right under their nose, basically.

We went on to smuggle more Afghani hash,

than anybody.

We did big things.

2400 pounds at a time.

We weren't fuckin' around.

We did one and another and another.

A couple brothers would fly to Germany.

Get a car into Afghanistan,

meet up with the Tilkai brothers,

all this kind of stuff.

Work out a deal, 200, 300, 500 pounds.

After the dope was loaded,

seal, weld 'em all back up,

and maybe have it shipped to Seattle.

The drive it from Seattle, Portland down to Laguna.

They were not dummies.

They had some smart people in there,

but they're all crooks.

Winter of '67, Timothy moved to Laguna.

He came out and joined us.

- Tim saw in the brotherhood,

an actualization of his own dreams,

of his own imagination,

and he loved it,

and they loved him.

- Timothy was a focal point,

a spiritual focal point that was necessary.

And he was brilliant.

And his spiritual insight was profound.

You know, John Griggs was a holy, holy, holy man,

and Timothy had a big influence on John Griggs,

but John Griggs had a bigger influence on Timothy Leary.

Timothy Leary looked up to Johnny

as a spiritual being.

They both had the same vision and the same dream,

to turn the world on.

The energy was moving so fast at that particular time.

- It got to a point where it...

If somebody had some LSD, or some pot, or some hash,

and they said this was from The Brotherhood,

that's all they needed to say.

It would be sold quick.

It was starting to slip

into a different gear.

Dodge City had been taken over by more hippies,

and rock 'n rollin',

probably crazier than ever.

More and more people

were peripherally involved with us,

and then you started hearing people say,

"You know so and so?"

And I'd say, "No, I don't know that person."

"Well, they're Brotherhood members."

It wasn't for the whole anymore.

It was a group of a bunch of smugglers

that worked together.

That was a whole 'nother thing.

That's kind of a business, in a way.

Police were starting to go,

"Oh my God this is getting out of control, you know?"

They're having big public meetings

with a few thousand people showing up.

The game we played before

was just cat and mouse,

and we were always winning.

Things got a little more serious after that.

They just wanted us outta there.

Laguna was tired of the hippie scene.

- Mystic Arts World was torched

by the elders of Laguna Beach.

They arsoned our store.

They threw a fire bomb through the fucking sky light,

and it smoke damaged everything.

And it was way too hard to reopen.

The writing on the wall was very clear to everyone.

It was probably that those days were over.

The spring '68 is when we bought a ranch

in Idyllwild, California called Fobes Ranch.

It was an experiment in communal living.

We were trying to find this ideal lifestyle,

and it was like everybody contributing,

everybody pitching in, whatever you can give.

We did everything together.

You know, we cooked together, ate together,

you know, had our ceremonies together.

The whole group, the whole thing, it was family.

We were all a family.

Family values, that's what we tried to cultivate,

and that was a lot of Johnny's goal.

Everyone of my children, from day one up,

they knew exactly what was going on.

You know, they were part of the movement.

If my children were playing with the

outside of these realms,

they knew not to talk about what went on,

and they were all very, I would say, savvy.

They were miniature hippies.

The vision was always to produce LSD,

but once we got to a certain stage with that,

and Johnny saw I was able to take care of it,

he moved back.

He wanted to live a more domestic life,

and I took over for him with the traveling and all of that.

I was always trying to find Michael a girlfriend,

'cause he was a sincere, neat guy.

I would have probably been a lot more peaceful,

if I was just pursuing my spiritual life at the ranch,

but I was obeying a higher calling.

We were successful.

We sold everything and we got to where

we were ready to take the next step,

which was make more.

So, we bought a house close to Palm Springs,

and we set up a lab in there.

Everybody took off to Afghanistan to do these scams.

Well, we were tired of doing these Volkswagens

and getting 400, 500 pounds in them, right?

So, we find the finest motorhome we can,

and I go out to Pomona and we buy a Lazy Days,

and we get this guy Al that was in prison,

a Mexican welder,

and he does the car just like we want.

I put stash places everywhere.

There was probably ten different places to stash.

We did 1300 pounds in that one.

It was the first big one.

Summer of '68, I went back to Afghanistan

to get another load.

Mike Henson and David Hall,

they hollowed out a spot in these two surfboards.

And they could just pack 'em with hash.

So, I took 'em along.

Strapped 'em to the top of the VW.

Two surfboards in the dead of winter in Europe,

drove through the Alps,

and down and across all the way to Afghanistan.

They were really out of place,

and I had a wife and a little kid with me,

a little girl with me.

* I'm waiting for a man

* From Afghanistan to come

* He got a kilo in the bottom of a suitcase

* In a cabin son

* If the captain comes you don't give him no lip

* But you pick it up later and you know the trip *

- When we came back,

we shipped the surfboards as unaccompanied baggage.

We got home and everything was cool.

United Airlines had had some kind of strike

in their cargo thing,

and the two surfboards sat out in the yard in the sun.

And they were in canvas bags,

that were made out of denim, blue denim.

And the hash started goin' off,

started decaying in there and swelled up.

So, when the strike was over

they went to ship the boards to LA,

someone picked 'em up

and stuff was rattling around in there.

They cut 'em open, they found the hash.

They shipped it on over, had me come pick it up.

Customs agents even helped me load it

and tie it on the car,

rather than bust me right on the spot,

and then they followed me.

The rule at the ranch was, not to endanger the ranch.

You know, don't bring the load there.

Travis, God bless his soul,

has brought more heat down people

than anyone I've ever known.

The feds followed them all the way,

all the way to the fucking ranch,

and it was a disaster.

- They had a plane spotting me.

And when I went through the locked gate,

and got part way up the road,

I remember turning back

and looking back down in the valley,

and seeing this train of cars,

just coming up the dirt road, just hauling ass.

And they swooped on us,

guns drawn and everything and got us.

And then they wanted to see what was up this road,

where I was going.

The next thing I know, Travis pulls up,

and down comes the helicopter

that had followed him all the way in.

We looked out the windows and went, "Holy God!"

You know, they are so here.

The cops pull right up in the front of the ranch there.

There's all these hippies everywhere.

You know, they don't even know what to think.

What the heck's this?

And then they took me away.

- Everything was blown.

Now passports were checked.

What was shipped back?

Those surfboards, what was in 'em?

I mean everything, now they know.

Now, legal things are starting to happen.

A lot of money that was earned went into legal defense

for whoever it was that was in trouble.

We were a family, you know.

Nobody, nobody suffered.

Timothy Leary and a small contingency

of people from Millbrook

came to live at the ranch.

Timothy's philosophy is Taoism.

Taoism wants you to stay down.

Stay in the background, behind the scenes.

And when Timothy decided to run for governor,

it was almost against everything he'd been teaching us.

I'm going to run for the governorship

of the state of California.

I think that we need a new party,

and by party I mean party.

- We were like, what?

This guy's sitting in the teepee, next to the pear tree,

in the meadow at our ranch,

should not be running for governor.

* When you make love

* Play it to me

Johnny and I, when we got back to the teepee,

we both cried,

because it was something had changed.

It wasn't going in the direction that we wanted.

We had this engagement in the real world out here,

because we were trying to change it,

but we didn't want to be governor, you know.

I might have to put suits on

and dress up like I'm straight,

but that don't mean I have to be straight.

John Lennon wrote Come Together

as Timothy Leary's campaign song.

People hear that on the radio all the time now.

That song plays well, every theme song

for Timothy Leary's governor race.

He was gonna run against Ronald Reagan as governor.

- Let the kids get high.

As a matter of fact, President Nixon,

why don't we all turn on together.

At the time,

the government probably feared Tim Leary

more than they feared anybody.

Nixon thought that dope dealers

were among the worst criminals on Earth.

We must wage what I would call total war

against public enemy number one

in the United States,

the problem of dangerous drugs.

That was the beginning of the end.

That was when they decided to target Tim.

They're gonna get him one way or the other.

- This one night,

and it was December 26th of '68,

at about 11:00 P.M.,

I by myself, black and white police unit, full uniform,

and here's this car stopped

facing me in the middle of the road.

So, I walk over and I tap on the window,

and all of a sudden the window comes down.

And this grey-haired guy says,

"What's the problem officer?", real nice.

And I looked at him

and I'm thinkin', "Holy moly,

"this looks like Leary."

I said, "May I see your driver's license?"

"Oh sure", real nice.

Come, take out, and all of a sudden, bingo.

Timothy Leary, 1230 Queens Street,

Berkeley, California.

I said, "Well, Mr. Leary,

"I smell the odor of burned marijuana", which I did.

I tell Leary, "Step out of the car.

"This is a narcotic investigation."

He is just coming unglued.

You don't have probable cause.

This is an illegal stop.

This is an illegal this and that.

I go in his car,

obvious place to look first, the ashtray.

There's two little roaches there.

Pull 'em out, and I said,

"You're under arrest, Mr. Leary."

Dr. Leary's political ambitions

were cut short,

when Governor Reagan had Leary arrested,

and sentenced to 30 years in jail,

for possession of $10 worth of marijuana.

Tim was in prison and we were taking his appeal.

He had been arrested in Texas, bullshit charges.

He was arrested in California twice,

again no real charges,

but he was a political person who they feared.

And they would do anything to get him off the street,

get him into prison,

and try and shut him down.

Timothy was a spiritual leader,

and to keep the path going of Orange Sunshine,

we did the outrageous other option

that no one thinks of:

prison break.

The first thing that we did is

looked at the prison that Timothy was in

and started working with this guy on the inside,

"What is the best way to get out of here?"

That was over the fence,

just a straight up over the fence.

There was a place that was perfect to go over,

the way the trees were situated,

the road was virtually right fucking there.

And Timothy needed to start doing pullups and things

so he had better upper body strength,

and could get his ass over that fence.

I remember talks

around the table of the main house.

"Who was gonna fly him from here to there?"

This went on for six months, nine months or something.

You know, when you take LSD with people,

you feel every thought, every emotion all together.

And so, when you take LSD with a

advanced spiritual being,

you're gonna know about it right away.

You will have a different kind of trip.

And that's what Johnny was.

See, the higher doses you take,

the more far out it gets.

And it can get pretty scary too.

John was always there for when it got really heavy.

John would be the guy that could reassure you,

grab your hand and just touch you to make it feel,

make you go ma, the bad stuff go away,

just with his presence.

God always chooses unlikely things, you know.

Holy men are not

always what you really might think of.

They're...

A good holy man has got some flaws,

and something wrong,

or maybe they're not a perfect person now to T,

but they have a gift that is

something you can't explain.

Johnny Griggs was that way.

He was the most powerful man.

You know, I could never take LSD

with anyone that was higher than him.

It was unbelievable.

He really was something.

- We were in our teepee,

up in Idyllwild at the ranch,

and Johnny wanted to give thanks

to the universe.

And we got things ready in the teepee,

and food prepared,

and our firewood stacked and stuff,

and we were gonna have a session.

My mother, and father, and grandmother had all come up,

and they took the children with them,

so it was just Johnny and I.

I took the mescaline, and I thought Johnny did.

I had no idea.

It hadn't been very long,

maybe an hour.

Johnny says, "Something feels not right to me."

And I said, "What do you mean, not right?"

And I said, "I feel just fine."

He said, "Well, I didn't take what you took."

He says, "I was testing this new stuff",

that had just been given to him.

Johnny decided that whatever was happening

to his body wasn't right.

He said, "Call out", because other people in their teepees

were going to trip that night also.

It was gonna be a group thing,

but we had started early.

So, we stayed together most of the night,

but he was physically struggling,

which I had never ever seen before.

At one point, I was walking out the teepee door,

and he said, "Stand there for a minute."

And I stood there, and he said,

"I do believe you are the most beautiful thing

"I have ever seen in my life."

And just then, like, I don't know,

it was like electricity went through me.

You know, it was...

I felt like he was saying goodbye,

and I just panicked.

I said, "Johnny please, please don't leave me.

"I mean if that's what's going on, I can't.

"I don't wanna be here without you."

You know, he was my teacher,

my lover, my best friend.

You know, he was my boyfriend, you know.

And, he said, "Mama",

he said, "we got it made."

The sun just came up and he fell forward.

I ran out of the teepee and there were some other people.

Mark got his dad to pull up the pickup.

We went down to the Hemet hospital.

Mark and I, we got ahold of Michael.

I was talking to Carol on the phone.

And the doctor came to her.

I could hear him, said, "He's gone."

When they told her that Johnny

had died, she started crying and screaming.

And I handed the phone to Mark,

and Mark said, "You know, it's true."

Michael couldn't even accept it.

None of us could.

It just, we were not prepared.

Boom,

the teacher was gone.

- He took the psilocybin,

and we don't know what happened.

I had taken it many times.

We had all taken it before.

So, I took some,

'cause I figured fuck it, I'll go with him.

I don't know, I wasn't sure what to do.

It didn't kill me.

It didn't kill me.

He was only 26.

After Johnny died, I think that's what

shattered a lot of the southern California movement.

I think it shook a lot of people's faith.

- It left some people adrift.

Some people didn't have enough of their own,

their own, know who they were themselves,

so many people relied so much on John

that it left them adrift.

A lot of people split at that point,

after John died, everybody just scattered.

The Brothers sent me over to Hawaii.

They've got a big house there.

I just remember in my mind,

it was hell being in paradise.

To feel so broken,

and then to be in such a beautiful place,

But I, you know, held up.

You know, because I had children.

I just knew I had to be strong.

No matter what, I had children,

and I had to be strong, I had a baby at my breast.

Yeah.

That's a hard thing to do.

Travis and other people went to Hawaii,

leaving more of a skeleton crew at the ranch.

I made sure there was money for things to work.

I took care of Carol and the kids.

I had to keep in motion.

Big things were going on.

Big, big things were going on.

I cannot let go of this, I have to.

The only way to accomplish what was started

is to continue to follow the path,

kind of like that little trail of crumbs

wherever God is taking me.

I got very high at the ranch once, by myself.

I think I took five doses of Sunshine or something,

you know, maybe 10,

and John came to me.

And we didn't talk, but there was energy exchanged,

and information and things.

And it was positively him, positively him.

We spent the day together, and we made a few plans.

We focused things, or we clarified things,

and I knew, I knew that we were gonna go forward

and really kick some ass now.

We were gonna do it and we did.

We made 10 kilos of LSD after that,

10 kilos of pure white LSD.

No one's ever done that before,

or since.

It's a lot lot.

- 100 million doses.

Most of the meetings about

planning Timothy's escape

were all done at the ranch.

Michael finally came up.

He had a date and times,

and they're, everybody's gonna be waiting,

and it's gonna happen.

There were people from New York at the ranch,

and other people,

and they gathered everyone together and said,

"Everybody, except the people live at the ranch

"need to leave now.

"Go now.

"Don't be here."

And a couple of people had been growing some pot plants.

I said, "You know what?

"Pull those fucking pot plants up and get everything.

"We gotta get ready.

"The onslaught, they're gonna come here."

Timothy needed to use a blanket

to keep the barbed wire and razor wire away,

and then drop down and wait at a certain place.

And this all had to be timed.

It all turns out that it was perfect.

$17,000, that what we gave the weathermen,

what they charged for picking him up outside the prison.

- They drove off a little ways.

He changed clothes immediately.

Then they met another car,

and they gave the clothes,

his prison clothes to the other car,

who turned around and went south.

They north with Timothy where there was a motorhome

that took him to Canada and they split from there.

Dr. Timothy Leary, formerly of Harvard,

now known as the high priest of the drug cult

escaped during the night

from the California Men's Colony of San Luis Obispo.

Apparently he simply walked out

of the minimum security prison.

September 15th, 1970.

This is the fourth communication

from the Weathermen Underground.

The Weathermen Underground has had

the honor and pleasure of helping Dr. Timothy Leary

escaped from the POW camp

of San Luis Obispo, California.

Dr. Leary was being held against his will,

and against the will of millions of kids in this country.

He was a political prisoner,

captured for the work he did in helping all of us

begin the task of creating a new culture

on the barren wasteland that has been imposed

on this country by Democrats, Republicans,

Capitalists, and creeps.

LSD and grass, like the herbs, and cactus,

and mushrooms, of the American Indians,

and countless civilizations

that have existed on this planet

will help us make a future world

where it will be possible to live in peace.

Now, we are at war.

- I had this little short

fling thing in life.

This man from New York,

he wanted to wine and dine me,

take me

to Jamaica, me and the kids.

And I considered taking off and just

go to some foreign country and drop out for a little while.

And Michael'd come up with some

really beautiful, gorgeous woman.

She was French or Moroccan.

She had the accent, the looks.

She was just so fabulous, you know?

I felt jealous.

I'd never ever, I didn't know what the feeling was,

'cause I'd never felt that before.

I never had to, not like that.

And, they went off, went under the waterfall tripping,

and I tell my girlfriends,

"God, what is, why do I feel this way?

"Why do I feel so anxious and torn

"that he's all gone off with this woman, you know."

I says, "I don't know."

I says, "I think I love Michael."

- I was with someone on

the top of the mountain,

that was my lover for a while.

And I loved this woman.

I loved her a lot,

but I realized, just like

a bell went off,

that I loved Carol,

and that she was the only woman I wanted.

I just wanted Carol.

I mean, I just knew it.

Boom!

I said, "I'm gonna do everything I can,

"and come, and come back here,

"and I'm gonna try and get her to marry me."

When he showed up at the ranch,

with his little suitcase, you know,

I was in the kitchen,

and I was hand-squeezing orange juice,

and making oatmeal for the kids,

and all of a sudden he appeared.

Said, "I just came up to tell you that I loved you."

I told Carol, "I gotta have you, baby."

- And I said, "My God!"

You know?

I mean, I had no idea he had

those kind of feelings for me, you know.

I said, "Well, I was thinking about running off to Jamaica"

And he said, "My God, what about me?"

And I just looked at him and said,

"Yeah, what about you?

"You know, I'm totally in love with you.

"I was just trying to escape somewhere, you know?"

He threw a kiss on me and we've never been apart.

Shortly after that, we got married.

In the early 70s, we had become

an international

situation.

We made a really huge amount of acid in Europe.

And we set up hash oil factories in Lebanon.

- At that particular point,

The Brotherhood was the largest

supplier of psychedelics,

in the world.

We tried to get the feds involved.

We tried FBI.

Not anything doin'.

We tried the B and DD.

They said, "Oh, we've heard about this group.

"It's nothing."

And we said, "Look, this is what we have."

We brought in a couple boxes of records,

showing this whole tie-in.

There is an organization called

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

Yes, it's incorporated as a religious organization,

but within that organization is this core group

of big time buyers and distributors,

and it's just not Laguna Beach.

It is nationwide,

and now we're finding out it's international.

And the feds were just spellbound.

- We really became a target.

The crosshairs were on us,

and on me a lot.

We knew our phone was tapped,

we knew that we were under surveillance a lot of time.

- It took 'em another year

of watching and tapping and foll...

they followed me to Saint Martin,

followed me ski trips,

followed me to Europe, followed me everywhere.

They didn't catch me.

They didn't catch me smuggling.

They caught me with a whole lot of money,

but they didn't catch me with any dope.

- They never got any hash.

So, how can you be convicted of smuggling

3000 pounds of hash,

when they don't even have one pound?

They don't have an ounce.

They don't have anything.

There was never a case that the government had made

that really had any substantial criminality underlying it.

They just didn't have it.

So, what the government had to do

was bring the Hell's Angels into the case,

and say to the world,

"These guys are working with the Hell's Angels.

"They're making acid.

"Hell's Angels are distributing the acid.

"Killing everybody.

"They're the nastiest people on Earth,

"so these guys can't be any god damn good either."

That was their whole theory of the conspiracy.

Put the bad together with the good

and bring the good down.

The Brotherhood indictment was a conspiracy charge

for everything, you name it.

It was conspiracy engulfed it all, from hash smuggling,

weed smuggling,

manufacturing of LSD.

They were charged with it all.

Michael and Eleanora, our lawyers called me,

and said, "I do believe

"it's time to leave."

Over the weekend,

in a concerted multi-state raid,

federal authorities captured members

of the international drug-smuggling ring

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

- When the indictment came out,

it was like.

They hit everywhere, they got everybody at once.

It was like, bam!

You know, everybody was busted.

They were busting my ranch.

They were busting Chuck Scott's house.

They were busting Jack Harrington's house,

looking for Gordon.

They were going after everybody, man.

Federal, state, and local narcotics officers

arrested 15 of 29 persons indicted

by the Orange County grand jury.

Authorities seized

7.9 million dollars in drugs,

and two LSD laboratories.

At the time, it was a unprecedented

coordinated effort among the feds,

and all the local people;

California, Oregon, Hawaii.

The news people were all over it.

They were gonna put us down once and for all.

Mark Stanton, and Russell and his wife and kids,

everybody had kids,

me and Carol and all, didn't know what to do,

so we went to the Barnum and Bailey Circus.

And we just sort of stayed there all day.

We could be anonymous in it.

And we saw the first show,

and then it got finished.

Saw the next show,

and we would sometimes go out to the car

and listen to the radio a little bit,

and see if we could hear anything else.

Three more member

of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love

have been caught in an overnight raid

by authorities in Orange County, California.

14 members of The Brotherhood,

including Dr. Timothy Leary, remain fugitives.

Authorities now...

- That was it.

That was the day that was over.

You know, everything that we had known before that

was pretty much finished.

- We just ran.

We all just ran,

and hid, with our kids.

We were all separating

and going different places to hide out.

The pre-dawn sweep

of southern and northern California,

Hawaii, and Oregon,

netted 1.5 million LSD tablets,

30 gallons of hashish oil.

Somebody warned me that they knew where I was

and they were coming to get me.

- So, Travis and I left.

We left that afternoon.

And we flew from there to Belize,

and then from Belize we took a bus,

and then we switched our IDs as we crossed the border.

We went into Yucatan with new ID.

Michael and I went to the Caribbean.

We just bought tickets, paid cash.

Gone, no record, nobody.

We went to the Bahamas and Cayman Islands,

and we ended up in Jamaica.

We were underground for sure.

We had to change our identity,

but we were good at that.

We were like chameleons,

whatever the situation called for, you know.

Be straight, be not straight.

You know, be groovy,

whatever we needed to be.

Our children, you know, they all kept their first names.

You know, they knew if somebody asked them questions,

they just don't answer certain questions.

They don't know, they're just kids.

I had to change their original transcripts

into a different name,

so we had records to get 'em into school.

The future was uncertain.

I did not know when we went to New Mexico

what was gonna happen.

I bought some jewelry equipment and stone cutting equipment,

and I started making a living with that.

We were just at the crest of the wave of the big boom

of Indian turquoise jewelry,

when it went off in the 70s.

Well, I spent 11 years as a fugitive.

Raised my family as a fugitive,

living all over world.

And I actually hooked up with Michael Randall,

and Chuck Scott who I hadn't seen in years.

Kind of rejoined the crew.

I bought a ton of hash,

so I gave them the whole Moroccan load to sell.

I just let them do it, and they moved it all.

- We were in the studio one day,

and the phone rang and it was from Travis,

and I could hear the conversation,

Michael talking to 'em,

Something inside me just knew something was wrong.

They tapped every phone in the town of Long Pine.

Me and a guy named Bill

were taking a Cayman Airways flight over the Grand Canyon.

We got on the plane, and the door closes.

The plane pulls away from the gate.

It was about three feet.

It pulls back up.

The door opens, these guys come on board,

two or three of 'em, memory...

They come up, stop right at my row,

look at me and go, "Mr. Ashbrook?"

I hadn't used the name in years,

years, and years.

I just didn't even look up.

"Mr. Ashbrook?

"Come with us, please."

I had met this guy through Chuck Scott,

from the east coast

who had been bringing in Pakistani hash on airplanes.

And he had somebody at the airport in New York

that would clear it.

I met Kitting,

he seemed like a straight shooter, good guy.

So I fly to Afghanistan, and I land I Kabul.

And when I'm walking up to immigration,

they see my name on my passport,

and I'm red-listed.

So, all of a sudden, everything's different

than anything I'd experienced flying in there before.

A guy says, "I need you to come with me."

I was on the run for about 10 years.

After I got back to America,

when I was back in California permanently,

I didn't have any ID for about eight years.

One day I'm moving Wendy up to northern California,

and I've got big pickup truck,

and it's filled with her stuff,

where I can't see behind me.

And I pull into this liquor store,

but I kinda miss the entrance to it,

and I had to back up,

but I couldn't tell if anyone was behind me,

and I couldn't see him.

So, I backed the truck up,

and I pulled around,

pulled into the little convenience store,

whatever market was there,

and I jumped out of my truck and I looked back,

and my car's like this,

and a cop car's parked right there,

and he's got his window down,

and he's goin' like this.

And he tells me, "Well, you almost hit me back there.

"You know that?"

I said, "I know, I couldn't see,

"but I didn't hit you, right?"

He said, "No, but you really came close though.

He says, "Well, let me see your license."

And I told him...

I kind of hemmed and hawed,

and he said, "You don't have a license, do you?"

I told him, "No."

Chuck Scott was killed

by US Marshals in Mill Valley.

Shot him in the head as he was running,

in front of his wife and his baby,

and she was pregnant.

Police were going to my parents' house,

telling 'em, "You know, we just shot Chuck in the back.

"You better tell us where your son and daughter are.

"You know, because when we find 'em,

"we're not going to ask questions.

"We're going to be shooting."

We were living outside of Boulder.

It was a little town called Lions,

out where it's really in the country.

It was a hot summer day,

and I had, I was studying for my

GIA Diamond Certificate class.

I'm studying for it,

and my son, Daniel, is takin' a nap.

He's sleepin' in my lap,

and the front door was open.

I didn't even hear their cars come.

We were down in the lower part of our house.

It was like a sunken room.

I stood up, and I looked out,

and I could see all these men

surrounding our house with rifles.

And I went over, and I said,

"Honey, they're here."

And he said, "Who?

"The kids are back from the beach already?"

I said, "No, they're here."

I made Michael promise me

that he would not panic and run.

They came charging in pointing 45s at me,

and I'm trying to tell them,

"I have a child in my lap."

You know, be careful.

They allowed us to hug and kiss.

They handcuffed him,

and that's when they drove away.

The 60s had its casualties.

It wasn't just a clean ride for everybody.

And I know that more than anybody.

But, through all trials, tribulation, and suffering,

we never ever lost faith.

There was so much at stake.

We were a unit,

and whatever we went through,

we went through together,

as a group,

as a couple,

as a family.

- Well, I made it.

You must have been overhead.

Good, good, good to see you again.

You good?

If you go like that, you got one missing lens.

We were very idealistic.

We were young kids and

it seemed like a beautiful utopia dream.

We were trying to make it real.

One, two three.

And again.

The Brotherhood will never end.

It's in the people that had that experience,

that were there, that experienced that special time.

It'll be with 'em forever.

They'll carry it past their graves.

No, your favorite.

- Oh, okay.

We don't have Social Security.

We have nothing.

If I don't pay my rent next month, we're on the street.

There probably isn't one of us

that couldn't say that the other guy owes 'em

a half a million,

but I imagine if he paid a half million,

he'd pay the half million, that all,

that there would be even in the end,

'cause everybody's got a story,

but we don't care.

It isn't like somebody else burned us, or took anything.

Loaded balls, we don't care.

It all's a wash.

We're here, we love each other.

Awesome, dude.

I'm happy to spend the day with you.

Those things don't change, those things don't change.

Once you really are the same, and one,

and brothers, and real friends, it doesn't matter.

Time can't space friends.

You just are.

I often thought

that if I ever told a story about my life,

I would call it The American Story,

because I think all of it is very American,

even the drugs, the psychedelics.

We have a lot of freedoms here in this country,

and we exercised those freedoms to the utmost,

to experiment the way that we did,

and to travel worldwide and to take big risks.

I think that's an American story, I really do.

It's hard for people to believe

that Eleonora and could have lived

through the times we lived,

and never been afraid.

Loved his work.

Crazy, yeah maybe.

No, it's because we believed.

We believed in what we were doing,

and if we took us out, 'cause we were doing it,

we'd have been taken out.

It just didn't happen to us.

It happened to a lot of other people.

- We were outlaws, yes.

We broke the law, you betcha.

Laws were wrong.

We have to break 'em if they're wrong,

because we had a goal of wanting to turn on the world.

Then in only 50 years,

we have organic foods in all kinds of places.

The changes that have bloomed

all around the world as a result

of taking people psychedelics.

I know for sure that Steve Jobs took Sunshine.

I know positively that the guy that discovered

the double helix DNA was high on acid,

and I'm pretty sure it was Sunshine.

What we were involved in is human enlightenment.

That's no small thing.

I mean, 120 million doses of acid.

That's called turning on the world, man.

* We are the nomadic kids

* And they can't take that away

* We come with a message now

* It's fighting down away

* Some day old Sister Jude

* Will be in a holy place

* Our brothers

* These kinda brothers

* Our brothers

* What's your name

* Orange Sunshine

* Do you want more

* Yeah yeah