# The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was an organization of drug users and distributors that operated from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s in Orange County, California. They were dubbed the Hippie Mafia by the police. They produced and distributed drugs in hopes of starting a "psychedelic revolution" in the United States.

## History

The organization was started by John Griggs as a commune, but by 1969, had turned to the manufacture of LSD and the importing of hashish. Appearing in 1968 as an orange tablet measuring about 6 mm across, "Orange Sunshine" acid was the first largely available form of LSD after its possession was made illegal. Tim Scully, a prominent chemist, made some of these tablets, but said that most "Sunshine" in the USA came by way of Ronald Stark, who imported approximately thirty-five million doses from Europe.
In 1970 The Brotherhood of Eternal Love hired the radical left organization Weather Underground for a fee of $25,000 to help Timothy Leary make his way to Algeria after he escaped from prison, while serving a ten-year sentence for possession of marijuana.
Their activities came to an end on August 5, 1972, when a drug raid was executed on the group where dozens of group members in California, Oregon and Maui were arrested. Some who had escaped the raid continued underground or fled abroad. More members were arrested in 1994 and 1996, and the last of them in 2009; Brenice Lee Smith served two months in jail before pleading guilty to a single charge of smuggling hashish, and then was released after being sentenced to time served.

## Film

* Rainbow Bridge, 1971 film
* Mr Nice, 2010 film
* Kane, Rich (December 2011). "Orange Sunshine: When Laguna Beach Was the LSD Capital of the World". Laguna Beach Patch. Patch. Archived from the original on 2021-12-13. Retrieved 2 July 2021 – via youtube. Nick Schou, author of "Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World," gives you a tour of the places and characters from a long-gone era of Orange County history.
* The Sunshine Makers, 2015 film
* Kirkley, William A. (2016). Orange Sunshine.

## Books

* Lee, Martin A.; Shlain, Bruce (1985). Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 9780394550138. OCLC 1145784896.
* Emmers, Bob (December 25, 1998). "Laguna on Acid: The Great Hippie Christmas Invasion of 1970". Archived from the original on 31 March 2003. Retrieved 3 July 2021.
* Tendler, Stewart; May, David (2007). The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia : the Story of the LSD Counterculture. Cyan Books. ISBN 978-1-904879-95-4. OCLC 980273353.
       First released in 1984. "wider perspective on the history of LSD, ...extending the Brotherhood's story past the point where Schou stops it. Tendler and May also claim a closer relationship between the group and the Mellon heir Billy Hitchcock and the international smuggler (and suspected government provocateur) Ronald Stark "
* Schou, Nicholas (6 December 2011). Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World. St Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312551834. OCLC 428027195.
       " Schou keeps closer to the original Orange County gang, telling the story largely from their perspective."
* Minutaglio, Bill; Davis, Steven L. (9 January 2018). The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD. Grand Central Publishing. ISBN 9781455563586. OCLC 1242259460. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021. Retrieved 3 July 2021.