Quote:
Originally Posted by rousseau
Wait...what? Free love and drug use are two of the most enduring legacies of the tectonic cultural shifts of the late 1960s. It used to be that teenagers couldn't be alone without a chaperone, and the vast majority of people had their first full sexual experience either on their wedding night or very close to it. Any intoxicating substance other than alcohol was so taboo that discovery of an addiction (aside from alcoholism) would bring your social standing in the community crashing down.
People who view the changes wrought by the 1960s negatively would be the first to tell you that practically every aspect of the hippy program was absorbed into mainstream society by the mid-1970s.
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The hippies weren't an organized group with a coherent programme, and they didn't make up all (or even most) of the counterculture at the time. Many ideas that the hippies embraced (e.g., utopian socialism) never really caught on (see Rochdale College). Hippies were primarily middle class students playing revolution. They may have brought radical ideas back to the white-picket-fence scene, but their role in articulating and implementing social change is really overstated here.
Social mores around sex had started loosening up long before the 1960s. Taboos surrounding premarital sex were already loosening up in the 1920s, enabled by the increasing availability of contraception. Change was especially hastened during the social upheavals that accompanied WWII. By the time oral contraception had become available in the early 1960s, premarital sex was already pretty common, though not necessarily equally so across all social groups.
I'm not sure where your ideas about intoxicants are coming from. Heroin and cocaine were notoriously easy to come by in the early 20th Century and much more socially acceptable than they later became. By mid-century, barbiturates, benzodiazipines and amphetamines were in widespread use (and widely abused). Hallucinogens were admittedly more fringe before the 1960s, and LSD wasn't readily available for civilian use until after its patents had expired in 1963. The War on Drugs as we know it didn't really start until the 1970s, perhaps in part a response to the hippie element, but more so due to racial tensions in the US. I would also argue that addiction has actually become much more pathologized and stigmatized in the meantime.
A lot did change in the 1960s. It changed in part because people worked to make it change—people who didn't really fit the hippie mold, including those who were already working toward women's rights and civil rights. It changed in response to history and to the world's evolving material conditions: two profoundly disruptive world wars, the rise of the middle class, mass-produced plastics, the evolution of modernist thought and aesthetic, the slow introduction of South and East Asian philosophies and practices to the Western mainstream (however misunderstood they might've been), the rapid collapse of colonial empire—the list could go on and on.
It's important to note though: Although the role the hippies played was peripheral to those vast changes, it was absolutely not peripheral to the conservative North American establishment's experience of those changes (and, by extension, how they interpreted and mythologized those changes after the fact).
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