Summer of Love |
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Mind-Altering Drugs
By the mid-1960s, as North Beach became commercialized, baby boomers drawn to a Bohemian lifestyle began moving into a low-rent neighborhood across town, the Haight-Ashbury district. They shared the Beatniks' disdain for corporate America and the politics of inequality and war. But they preferred the sunshine of nearby Golden Gate Park to the darkness of coffeehouses, the passion of rock-and-roll to the cool of modern jazz, wild, expressive colors to beatnik black. They were derided by some as junior grade hipsters, "hippies" for short. Many began experimenting with communal living in the large Victorian houses of the Haight, and visions of a utopian society began taking shape, enhanced by a mind-altering new drug called LSD, or acid.