A rebellion against government, not inside it
The counterculture did not exist inside government in 1967. Officials, legislators and police were, for the most part, the people the movement defined itself against. The more accurate question is how authorities reacted, and the official reaction to hippies took the form of new drug laws, legislative hearings, surveillance of activists, and policing of a few city neighbourhoods.
These responses came from different levels of government and were not coordinated. State legislatures, the federal government, city police and health departments each acted on their own concerns.
California bans LSD
LSD was not illegal in the United States for most of the early 1960s. It was a research drug, manufactured by Sandoz, and it had been given to patients and volunteers in medical studies. As recreational use became known, especially around universities and in California, public concern rose. California made possession of LSD a crime effective 6 October 1966. That date was marked in San Francisco by a “Love Pageant Rally” in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, an early show of defiance by the emerging hippie community.
Federal law lagged and then tightened. Controls on manufacture and distribution came before controls on possession, and restrictions on possession followed later, in 1968. The details varied by state.
The Senate hearings
In 1966, Senate subcommittees held hearings on LSD, drawing researchers, doctors, law-enforcement officials and others. Senator Robert F. Kennedy attended some of the sessions and questioned witnesses, and the hearings helped establish the idea that LSD posed both medical and social risks. Sandoz, the Swiss maker, stopped its distribution of the drug in the United States around the same time.
The hearings did not settle the medical questions, and researchers disagreed then, as they do now, about what the evidence showed. What they did was make drug use a matter of national legislation rather than a local curiosity. They also ended most legal research on LSD for years.
Surveillance of activists
Government interest in dissent went beyond drugs. The FBI had long kept files on political groups, and by the mid-1960s that included antiwar and civil rights organisations. In August 1967 the bureau began a formal program aimed at “black nationalist” groups. A parallel program aimed at the New Left was launched in 1968, which is after the period covered here. The counterculture itself was less a target than the political activists who overlapped with it, though people in both worlds were of interest.
The details of this surveillance mostly became public later, after files were released in the 1970s. In 1967, most hippies did not know how closely they were being watched, and it is difficult to say how much attention any one group actually received.
Policing the Haight
The most visible confrontation took place in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. As the neighbourhood filled in 1966 and 1967, the city had to respond to crowded streets, runaways, drug arrests and public health worries. Police stepped up enforcement of narcotics and loitering laws. City officials, including health authorities, warned that the area faced problems with sanitation and disease as crowds arrived for the summer.
Residents and volunteers responded in their own way. Digger free food was served daily in the Panhandle, and a free medical clinic opened in the summer. These were community efforts partly filling a gap the city was not meeting.
Relations with police were often tense, with disputes over street gatherings and arrests for marijuana possession. The San Francisco police department’s stance was largely one of containment. Accounts differ about how heavy-handed individual incidents were, and the evidence is often drawn from participants on one side or the other.
Governors and mayors
Politicians gained from taking a firm line. Ronald Reagan, elected governor of California in 1966, appealed to voters unhappy with campus protest and public disorder. Elsewhere, local officials passed or enforced curfews, loitering laws and ordinances aimed at long-haired young people and at street gatherings. In New York, similar enforcement took place in the East Village and Tompkins Square Park.
Why the response was so strong
Several reasons stand out. Drug use by middle-class young people alarmed parents. The Vietnam War made draft resistance and antiwar protest a question of national security. And many officials saw the counterculture’s rejection of work, discipline and authority as a threat to social order, even when the participants themselves thought they were simply living differently.
The response had lasting effects. Stricter drug laws were passed in the following years, hippie neighbourhoods came under pressure, and the relationship between young people and the state became more adversarial. By autumn 1967, many Haight residents were leaving as crime and crowding worsened, though officials were only one of the causes.