Drugs In The 1960s Research Paper

Drugs were used as a means to escape reality. Drug use was already running rampant in the ghettos but was minimal among middle class white youth. Music helped popularize the use of drugs on college campuses.10 The use of marijuana peaked in 1967 with the release of the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" whose cover has marijuana leaves on it.11 The use of drugs by mainstream teens can be compared to the way a society accepts a new type of music or a new hairstyle. Using drugs was

The 1960’s presented Hippies with the chance to express their beliefs and attitudes in a number of diverse

Hippies represent the ideological, naive nature that children possess. They feel that with a little love and conectedness, peace and equality will abound. It is with this assumption that so many activists and reformers, inspired by the transformation that hippies cultivated, have found the will to persist in revolutionizing social and political policy. Their alternative lifestyles and radical beleifs were the shocking blow that American culture-- segregation, McCarthyism, unjust wars, censorship--needed to prove that some Americans still had the common sense to care for one another. The young people of the sixties counterculture movement were successful at awakening awareness on many causes that are being fought in modern

This counter culture that developed in the 1960s was an alternative lifestyle chosen by individuals who would eventually become known as hippies, freaks or long hairs (Richards, 2003). Members of the counter culture held a conviction similar to that of the new left wing movement, in that they wanted to overhaul domestic policy within the United States (MacFarlane, 2007). Hippies were generally dissatisfied with the consensus culture that had developed after the Second World War and wanted to distance themselves from American society hence the counter culture (Debolt, 2011).As a result,

The hippie movements of the sixties were driven by a plethora of factors. There were many new technologies that were being introduced in this period, a war against Communism around the globe, internal struggles against several types of injustices, a growing drug culture, and several other important developments. To say the least, it was a volatile period in American history and many sub-cultures were actively seeking to carve out new paths that were starkly different than the traditional norms. These generations who rejected traditional culture helped carve out a new trajectory for the United States and the movements influences can still be felt to this day.

Drugs greatly deepened the willingness and desire to love one another and satisfy oneself. Drug use was very prevalent in the 1960’s and the main reason was the counterculture. Drugs were promoted through many of the admired musical groups whom were the heads of the counterculture revolution. As a result many of their fans got addicted to drug use and influenced society in an altered drug state. The counterculture was founded by personal satisfaction and the main source of satisfaction was drugs. Drugs negatively affected the social revolution because it instilled complacency and a lack of desire to impact society within the members of the movement. Without the drug abuses, society would look much different today and the War on Drugs would not have affected as many people as it has throughout the history of the United

1. At about what periods in history did cocaine reach its first and second peaks of popularity, and when was amphetamine’s popularity at its highest? Cocaine -late 19th century and early 20th amphetamine- 1960s (Hart & Ksir, p. 125)

Around the same time within the late 1960’s, a new hippie movement was forming, which was often described as a counterculture.

The 1960s Hippie movement was a major point in the American history. In the 1960s a certain class of young people associated their lifestyles with the ideas of freedom, peace, and love. Hippies acted against white upper middle class lifestyle because they thought it was based on the wrong ideology. Hippies were against consumerism and American suburban life of the late 1950s and early 1960s was embodied in itself the idea of consumerism. Hippies, on the other hand, felt better about communal life with equal distribution of social goods. Traditional “bigger share” and consumerist greed as concepts of American society were despised by Hippies.

Laws were established, and plans were occurred in order to eliminate American citizens from obtaining and using drugs, additionally to stop other countries from manufacturing, transporting these drugs across borders into the United States and selling/distributing them. After countless failed attempts, it was determined by Nixon that the supply for drugs existed due to the large demand and the suppliers would find anyway to succeed. Unfortunately Nixon did not act according to this understanding. Following this, Nixon launched numerous attempts to go into Mexico and eliminate the supply side of the drug war. He quickly learned that eliminating one route used by drug traffickers only resulted in them opening another route to continue their

This new dynamic was seen initially in 1971 by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) spearheaded by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The survey indicated that many illegal drug users were employed full or part time. The initial survey was used to try and understand the scope of the problem,

Much like today 's war on drugs, the uprise of drug users in the seventies sparked much controversy in both normal American lives as well as those of the celebrity status. Countless studies of the time analyze class, age, gender, location and many other factors to try to determine a trend in drug abusers. In one article, two spectrums of drug abusers were identified. One spectrum was of young heroin users who have shown to statistically engage in illegal endeavors while the other spectrum is that of middle-aged southern whites (Ball, 1965). Drug addiction has also coincided with changes in society; at this time technology had recently

‘The hippie movement germinated in San Francisco, with the Vietnam War at its core. The movement eventually spread to the East Coast as well, centralized in New York's East Village in addition to the Haight-Asbury district of San Francisco and Sunset Strip of Los Angeles” (Buchholz 858). Many hippies were angry over the conformist lifestyle that Americans were living in, and wanted to live how they wanted to live not how their employer or television wanted them to live. Hippies also took a political

Since the early 1960’s there have been an alarming increase in drug use in the United States in 1962, four million Americans had tried an illegal drug. By 1999, that number had risen to a staggering 88.7 million, according to the 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.

The “hippies” of the 1960s had many effects on the American society. The visual appearance and lifestyle of the hippies were in sharp contrast to the conservative nature of the older generation, which defined them as a counterculture. The hippie lifestyle was based on free love, rock music, shared property, and drug experimentation. They introduced a new perspective on drugs, freedom of expression, appearance, music, attitudes toward work, and held a much more liberal political view than mainstream society.