Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World

Drug dealers with delusions of grandeur populate this colorful but overwrought history of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a 1960s-era narcotics ring–cum–hippie “church.” Influenced by psychedelic prophet Timothy Leary—who called the group's leader, former high school bully John Griggs, the “holiest man” in America—the California-based Brotherhood styled its cheap, extra-strength “Orange Sunshine” brand of LSD as a pathway to God. Journalist Schou (Kill the Messenger ) takes the “spiritual purpose” of these “psychedelic warriors,” along with their solemn acid-dropping sacraments and utopian pipe dreams, rather too seriously. (He likewise inflates their sporadic ventures scoring Mexican marijuana and Afghan hashish into a “global smuggling empire.”) His narrative quickly devolves into a haphazard picaresque of drug deals, drug busts, overdoses, surfing, rock concerts (Jimi Hendrix does a cameo), orgies, and people living in teepees. Schou sometimes forgets that reading about other people's acid trips—“The whole sky took on huge forms of dancing Buddhas and the energy got really bright”—is a drag. Still, the mixture of lively freakery and stoned pomposity gives his portrait of countercultural excess an authentic period feel. (Mar.)