How Hippies Turned a College Town into 'The Dope Capital of the Midwest' (Vice Magazine)

Sinclair was once described by Detroit Free Press as the city’s “head hippie,” a figure with “wild hair” and a “drooping mustache.” He was a radical, a member of a generation of pro-cannabis activists who saw the drug’s use as part of their resistance to capitalism and the state, and who sometimes made it the object of quasi-religious fervor. Sinclair saw weed as occupying a similar place as sex in Orwell’s 1984. It set teenagers’ basic desires in opposition with the capitalist establishment, and was a key weapon in the “total assault on the culture” the hippie movement was attempting.
But the strident anti-authoritarianism of the Detroit Artists Workshop—someone hung a banner out of the window during the infamous 1967 riots reading “Burn Baby Burn”—led to what activists described as harassment from the police, and violence from those with anti-hippie sentiments. After a firebomb attack on the MC5 bus and a series of assaults on women in the group, Trans-Love Energies relocated to a house on Hill Street in Ann Arbor, near the University of Michigan.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43jnk9/how-hippies-turned-a-college-town-into-the-dope-capital-of-the-midwest


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