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But why are you surprised? The hippies pushed free love and drug use. The inevitable end result was more children without stable families and drug addiction. When you step over those bodies you are stepping over the fruits of the hippy ideal.
1. Hippies were ~1960s. Children of hippies would then be adults in the ~1980s, and would be grandparents now. Tenderloin's median age[1] is 38, or 20 years too young
2a. Hippies pushed marijuana and psychedelics. Weed has a 10% addiction rate. LSD and psilocybin have no addiction rate.
2b. Drugs that are addictive (heroin) had complex, controversial and conspiratorial factors [2] (and that's aside from the complexity of "addiction" itself)
2c. Alcohol and alcoholism had (and has) way more impact.
3a. Family instability (re: divorce rates) occurs in far, far more places than the hippy movement.
3b. Just because a family is stable doesn't mean it produces healthy adults
[1] https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/CA/San-Francisco... [2] https://www.vera.org/reimagining-prison-webumentary/the-past...
2a. Recreational drug use cannot be so neatly compartmentalised as you might think. The only reason I tried marijuana and psychedelics but refused speed was because I was a nerd who researched things on erowid. I don't know if you've met young working class party-goers, but most are not so discerning.
2b. The quote you provided doesn't support what you said.
2c. It has a significant impact, but you're delusional if you think it has more of an impact than amphetamines and heroin. I'm certainly not here to defend alcoholism.
3a. Free Love is going to result in more accidental pregnancies and more children being born in unstable situations. I surely don't need to explain this.
3b. No, but it damn sure helps.
That you are 35 (hi, 36) and raised by people who came of age during the hippy time (also, hi, same!), I would presume, explicitly means you were not a result of hippy free love attitudes, and were a planned child, since those were ~60s and we're both 80s babies.
PS - Props to you for researching on Erowid!
Aside from any differences in observations about "working class party goers" (which, boy howdy do I have), if your theory is that "hippy attitudes towards their drugs cause addictive drug use today", that's going to run into a host of problems starting with the differences in which drugs.
I don't understand how direct testimony that significant power (political, governmental, social, etc etc) at the time was directed to destabilizing the community you're talking about doesn't support my assertion that any conversation around addiction in those communities is going to be complicated.
I'd bet $100 (probably more) that alcoholism has a larger overall impact than (illegal) drug addiction, if only because of there are far more people with an addiction to alcohol than there are people with addictions to illegal drugs; ie total case count. I can't speak to statistic regarding relative harm on a per-person basis; ie - yeah I wouldn't be surprised if the average heroin addict experiences more harm from their addiction than the average alcoholic.
Similarly, bet you $100 that abstinence-only education results in more accidental pregnancies and more children being born into unstable situations than "Free Love" ever did then or "sex-positivity" does today. If only because (IME) free love attitudes largely also come with pro-birth-control attitudes.
Re: Bets - I'm serious. We'd OFC have to formalize the question and answer-methodology ala prediction marketplaces, which might functionally prevent an actual bet, but regardless, I'm serious.
In the hippies case, as the movement became more mainstream the establishment funded efforts to emphasize those aspects over the other, more socialist and anti-war aspects that were the basis of the earlier counter-culture.
Just look at the evolution in the music of the movement: protest songs of the early to mid 60s (Dylan, Sam Cooke, Simon & Garfunkle...) gave way to the commercially produced, glitzy psychedelic music in the late 60s. From Surrealistic Pillows in 1967 to American Beauty in 1970 and beyond it was basically about sex, partying, navel gazing and spacing out.
The message clearly became much safer and, as it happens, more profitable.
I've even heard one conspiracy theorist say that the change in attitude for many bands was orchestrated by 3-letter agencies to influence the anti-war movement, though I don't know how much evidence there is of that.
There are similar conspiratorial views that the mainstreaming of Woke has been an elite push to distract/disrupt the class consciousness Occupy movement.
