Lessons From the Haight-Ashbury Era

“Everyone you ought to talk to is already dead” is a sentiment I’m told repeatedly when asking about Haight-Ashbury in 1968. The people I do speak to seem to paint the era as a bundle of thorny contradictions, each one more unnerving than the last. “There were good things about it. There were horrible things about it,” says Stanley Mouse, a legendary psychedelic poster artist and former Haight-Ashbury resident, over the phone. “Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Then everything went downhill, but it started out really, really beautiful.” I remind him of Charles Manson, whose Hollywood killing spree also cast an ambient paranoia and suspicion onto the hippie generation. “Right, right,” he agrees. Haight-Ashbury in 1968 has often been described this way: A place where counterculture decayed into rot. Still, Mouse emphasizes that it had beautiful beginnings.

Of course, I believe him. The elusive marijuana-induced beauty possessed by the Haight-Ashbury was prominent in my childhood, growing up in Sonoma County, only an hour from San Francisco. As a teenager, I would beg my parents to drive me into the city to catch a glimmer of the Haight-Ashbury euphoria that drove thousands of young people to San Francisco in the 1960s, to the dismay of their parents. 

It was gone by the time I got to it—displaced by corporate coffee shops and twee, glossy clothing stores. In 2023, Janis Joplin’s residence in Haight-Ashbury was listed for $3.625 million. The expansion of the tech industry sterilized San Francisco’s eccentric spirit, forcing rents to an all-time high. Today, the spirit of the Summer of Love exists more symbolically than materially in Haight-Ashbury, with vintage shops that sell Grateful Dead T-shirts priced at $100, mass-produced tie-dye beach towels, and neon glass-blown bongs that serve as a cheap totem to groovier, simpler times. 

READ: Stanley Mouse’s Art for the Grateful Dead Became the Totems of Psychedelic Rock

It is impossible to live now as you once might have in San Francisco: sworn to be barefoot, reading Marxist theory, and free of regret. Today, the media seems to have a morbid curiosity about the city, where drug overdoses and theft are the subject of ongoing scrutiny and discussion. The wayward ideals that once were at the heart of San Francisco have now been usurped by a commitment to expansion, unbridled consumerism, and private interest. Small businesses have been usurped by chain retail stores and luxury high-rises at the expense of character, the way that pricey restaurants and Apple stores have become a cheap facsimile of culture. The city seems to have lost its way, facing a dearth of infrastructure and resources. The free-wheeling love that transformed San Francisco in the 1960s was abandoned for an entrepreneurial ambition that echoed out across the bay. 

“It was often described as living on a block where all the kids were like you,” says Tom Constanten, over the phone, of Haight-Ashbury in 1968. The former Grateful Dead band member calls me from the remote mountains of New Mexico, where audible wind keeps disconnecting us. I ask Constanten about his reaction to the FBI-led investigations into the Grateful Dead for their involvement with LSD in the Haight-Ashbury. “Things were moving so fast. They moved at a much faster tempo. Things that would outrage you or surprise you in ordinary life were not outrageous because they were coming every day,” he says with a soothing calm. For what it’s worth, they weren’t hippies either; at least, they didn’t call themselves that. Constanten explains that hippies was a pejorative term for “the beatniks putting down people who were affecting the trappings of hipness without actually getting it.” The term was adopted by the media as a synonym for drug-using lost youth who landed in San Francisco. 

It’s exhilarating to hear Constanten’s rendering of the Haight-Ashbury in 1968—an era that has been memorialized in American history to almost mythical proportions. The San Francisco neighborhood became an enclave for psychedelic exploration, musical innovation, and the Free Love movement. The American public was bewildered and suspicious. The Haight-Ashbury seemed to swallow everything in its wake, later becoming a symbol of debauchery and heathenism in the late 60s. In Joan Didion’s famous essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she described the neighborhood as a society careening on collapse: “Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.”

Naturally, Constanten is less cynical of the past. “We knew they were special times at the time. We had an inkling that they wouldn’t last long. It’s become a ‘there’ that you cannot go back to,” Constanten says. The Grateful Dead—who lived in a house in the neighborhood— are now considered pioneers of psychedelic rock and the Haight-Ashbury scene; their influence is still far-reaching and monumental. 

Constanten and bandmate Bob Weir lived in a house where they dabbled in psychedelics and held concerts in Golden Gate Park, which became historic congregations of like-minded people, often tripping. Fans of the band, affectionately named Deadheads, dropped out of society to follow the band across the country, with acid as ubiquitous as the jamming. The band’s legacy has become synonymous with LSD use. “Early on, they discovered that if you take too much, you become a spectator even if you’re standing on stage. So, they would take a smaller amount, called a lubrication,” Constanten says of the band’s drug use.

Stanley Mouse, who worked as a poster artist for the Grateful Dead and other bands in the area, speaks of his storied time in the Haight-Ashbury with nostalgia. “There was that song: Come to San Francisco with flowers in your hair,” Mouse says. “They all showed up there. They were all living on the street. Luckily, the society was so rich at that moment that they could live on the streets. It was pretty easy. The economy was good. Everything was different then.” 

Occasionally, Mouse describes the scene of Haight-Ashbury with a sentimental poetry and plot that you might expect from a Thomas Pynchon novel. He is a delight to speak with, casually recounting run-ins with Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and Eric Clapton. (Slick was unimpressed with his art, which he chalks up to professional jealousy.) When I asked him why San Francisco became the stage for a cultural revolution, his answers were expectedly, for lack of a better word, far out. “All the great people in history like Freud, Shakespeare, Plato, and Michelangelo were reborn at this time period and met up in San Francisco,” he says. Mouse was also close friends with Janis Joplin and spent time with the musicians and artists who came to define the scene. 

Spirituality and drug use were often intertwined, he explains. “People said you could get higher off meditation than you can get from psychedelics. I bought some books on meditation, and I started meditating. And it was true. You can get higher.” It was also noteworthy that young men in the street looked like Jesus, he explains—long hair, beards, sparsely dressed in sandals. He recalls a summer day when a group of hippies entered a diner, and a waitress angrily accused them of masquerading as Christ-like figures. “Psychedelics was a shortcut to God,” he says with a laugh.

In 1966, psychedelic art started to infiltrate the mainstream, as Mouse called it, “the shot heard around the world.” His famous Grateful Dead poster of skeletons adorned with roses became a fixture of highfalutin art museums across the world. “We heard it was in the Leningrad Museum.” In the summer of 1966, the Grateful Dead loaned a studio to Mouse on Haight-Ashbury, where he continued to make psychedelic posters. “It was so beautiful. People came from all over the world to see this thing that was happening. It got so famous. Everybody came to San Francisco from everywhere. And it became a nightmare.”  

I wonder—out loud to Mouse—what love could have meant in 1968. In Pynchon’s noir novel, Inherent Vice, set in the Summer of Love, he writes of love: “With the unspoken footnote that the word these days was being way too overused. Anybody with any claim to hipness ‘loved’ everybody, not to mention other useful applications, like hustling people into sex activities they might not, given the choice, much care to engage in.” Over the phone, Mouse jokes: “Free love? The best place to pick up girls was the Haight-Ashbury clap clinic because they were clean. That’s a funny joke about San Francisco Free Love.” With loose sexual mores and uninhibited drug use, exploitation soon followed. Young girls who ran away from home were vulnerable to sexual assault, a near-constant occurrence in the neighborhood. Beyond this harsh reality, the vision of too-easy-living was also complicated by the ongoing Vietnam War and racial tensions that fueled a lot of young people to abandon the moral rubric of their parents. 

There were warring ideologies and different schools of thought on how to heal society in the Haight. Timothy Leary, a psychologist out of Harvard University who believed in LSD’s potential as a means of exploring personal expansion, gave a speech at a rally called the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, where he uttered the famous words: “Drop out of high school. Drop out of college. Drop out of graduate school. Drop out of junior executive. Drop out of senior executive.” 

During this time, Dr. David Smith founded the free clinic on Haight-Ashbury with the philosophy of non-judgmental care. Smith describes this period as a “very turbulent time,” with rampant substance dependence in the neighborhood. His work also, he says, contributed to “the second psychedelic revolution”—not the second wave of psychedelic research, but “the widespread recreational self-administration use, and all these young people who came to the Haight-Ashbury with a philosophy of better living through chemistry.” 

In the first days of the clinic, they treated over 250 patients, operating 24 hours a day. The cases in the clinic were wide-ranging, from bad trips to sexually transmitted diseases. “People thought San Francisco was warm during the summer. It was cold. They had pneumonia and skin infections, all sorts of lifestyle type illness,” he continues. “They’d go to the Grateful Dead in the park and dance on psychedelics and end up with lacerations all over their feet.” 

READ: Inside the World’s Largest Collection of Acid Tabs

Smith describes the scene on Haight-Ashbury as giant decaying Victorians that got repossessed by rock bands intent on creating a new form of music that would become psychedelic rock. These musicians were local fixtures of the community and even patients at Smith’s free clinic. “There was really no barrier between the community and the musicians,” he explains. 

Smith’s work at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic ushered in widespread cultural change in how substance dependence was treated in San Francisco. “It began the free clinic movement, which is now all over the country,” he explains. “Our clinic was based on our philosophy because we saw healthcare as a right, not a privilege. President Obama used that term for his healthcare reform.”

The promise of a utopia eventually dissolved into a haze. As Joan Didion described, the center was not holding. Drugs like heroin became introduced in the scene, causing a sharp incline of deaths on the streets. Constanten believes the scene began to change in 1969. “It was starting to change. There were less palatable drugs coming in. Public media attention. Tourist buses come driving through to look at the hippies. It lost its original freshness.”

In 2024, The Grateful Dead is scheduled to tour this Summer, making stops across America. The legacy of the Haight-Ashbury still looms, especially in psychedelic advancements. Smith occasionally sees the original beauty of the neighborhood in glimpses. He tells me that he attended a Grateful Dead concert recently and was amazed at all the young people in attendance, which restored his faith in counterculture. 

“It could have been 1967 all over again,” Smith says. “This counterculture philosophy tends to flourish when young people perceive that the mainstream dominant culture is going wrong.” He remarks that our current moment has striking similarities to the 1960s: ongoing wars, gun violence, and healthcare inequity. His hope for future revolutions is that they don’t make the mistakes of his generation: “I always say that the third psychedelic revolution, you got to not repeat the mistakes in the past.”