Major Project Progress

This is an excerpt from the text Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s by Nicholas Knowles Brommell. As you can see, Brommell identifies two historical perspectives on the psychedelic revolution by referring to "those academicians who have written about the 1960s without an attempt to seriously or analytically relate drug consciousness to the events of th 1960s..."(similar to Sharon Monteith) and a "second class of books" who "simply attack it" and "tap into our profound... fear" to further "conservative political agendas" (similar to Theodore Roszak). This line of thought supports my original findings and reinforces the strict divisions in historical thought regarding the cause/impact/legacy of drug use/abuse in the Sixties. Whilst explaining the contrasting ideologies, Brommell alludes to his own opinion that drug use was inextricably connected to the revolutionary atmosphere of the Sixties and was beneficial to the generation by stimulating change and a 'new consciousness'. Brommell states that the use of drugs by Sixties youth was not mere escapism, but a vital public philosophy. This is a similar, albeit much less radical, view as Timothy Leary.

The stats in this text are presented in quite a different light to those provided by the website I found earlier, although they claim to use the same source.


The above source presents information collected from college students and whilst the website uses stats from the same survey, they focus upon adult drug use. Clearly, the major drug users of the Sixties would be the youth of the counterculture and not the adult conservatives. Hence, the website below provided a deceptive and bias portrayal of the Sixties in order to lessen the stigma attached to the decade. Are other historians exploiting information in a similar way?

P.S Recently found an essay by David Farber titled The Intoxicated State/ Illegal Nation: Drug Use in The Sixties Counterculture which can be found in the collection Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's. I am eager to get my hands on a copy as the first couple of pages were very interesting.