Wednesday, August 25 - Orange Sunshine Flashback!

Wednesday at 2:30 pm on KPFK. This week we air the last of summer reruns. New shows next Wednesday, but meanwhile here's a great one. My guest is Nick Schou, an investigative journalist who has written a book so unbelievable as to challenge the premise of so much “counter-culture” history, not to mention credulity. His Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World takes on the apocryphal-seeming story of a group of surfer-hippies who are either criminals or prophets, or both, social experimenters of the late 60’s and early 70’s who embraced mind-altering LSD and mescaline, marijuana as a kind of sacrament. Or were they only petty crooks and hustlers? Schou locates the founding of the famous “hippie mafia” in, yes, the foothills of Orange County of all places, and traces their relationship to media court jester-guru-FBI informant Timothy Leary and the establishment of Laguna Beach as hippie Mecca and drug-selling hub. This is just plain fun, when it is not alarming and weird, with smuggling stories and other adventures of the underground. Schou is a terrific writer, full-time staffer at OC Weekly. His writing has also appeared in numerous weeklies over the past decade, including LA Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Washington City Paper, the Sacramento News & Review, and the Village Voice. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Epidemic Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, a book which found a very welcome audience at KPFK. Thanks for listening!