Joel Selvin: The LSD use was a fundamental building block in a new way of thinking in a new community.
Selvin: Why do we have war? What is the power of love? Who is God and why is he here and what has he done for me lately anyway? I mean, these were questions that were being debated by young people who were just growing into their bodies and their minds and their selves.
Kasper: We really thought that drugs were going to change the world. We really did. We thought if you turned on, if you took acid, you would really change, because we had changed from those experiences. Experiences of cosmic oneness, where I truly felt I was no different than you, I was no different than my black friends; I was no different than anyone who lived in any other part of the world, nor was I that different from my dog. God lived inside all of us is a clichˇd way of putting it.
Selvin: You were going through a door, and you wanted to be in the rooms on the other side of that door. You wanted to know what was there and you wanted to take that knowledge back with you.
Timothy Leary (archival): It is a sense of being in communion with powers greater than yourself and intelligence which far outstrips the human mind and energies which are very ancient. You have a sense of being brought in to God's workshop and that the veil is pulled away and for the first time you see how things really are.
Selvin: Hey, you know, we're trying to learn to live better, to think better, to be better human beings and be a better race, be a better civilization and to make this whole thing work.
Grateful Dead Member 1 (archival): What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet, we're not thinking of anything else. We're not thinking about any kind of power. We're not thinking about any of those kinds of struggles. We're not thinking about revolution or war or any of that. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life and think about moving the whole human race ahead a step.
Grateful Dead Member 2 (archival): And one of the ways of achieving that being is through drugs. I think personally, the more people that turn on, the better world it's going to be.
Joel Selvin: The music changed just immediately. I cannot explain to you what it's like to be in a crowd of 5,000 people on LSD with the Grateful Dead, also on LSD, leading the crowd through a series of improvisations. Before that, rock and roll songs were three minutes, period, paragraph, we're out of here.
Charles Perry: One of the peculiar things about LSD was that for a very long time it was legal. It seemed illegal. I mean, it was so wild, you figured that it, you know, if every, anybody hears about this, they're definitely going to make it illegal.
Ronald Reagan: Well, I'm terribly frightened by the problem of LSD. I think there's been a great deal of misinformation by those who seem to see no harm in it. I think our only hope lies in a concerted effort of education so that young people will be aware that there's nothing smart, there's nothing grown up or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all. They're just being complete fools.
Narrator: California did make LSD illegal on October 6, 1966. The hippies openly flaunted the new law with a "Love Pageant" rally in the Haight, and their own declaration of independence: "... the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights," it read, "that among these are the freedom of body, the pursuit of joy and the expansion of consciousness." On the heels of the Love Pageant, a group of anarchist street performers called the Diggers began distributing free food.