There were really only two paths;
Trust authority to tell us who got to do psychedelics,
OR
Ride with Tim Leary and the crew
Since the 'intellectuals' in this country are NOT independent of the power structure, rather, representative of it, I don't really think acid snobbery was the answer.
If the intellectual elite was all that elite, they wouldn't BE subservient to established authority in the first place, and THEN they could have taken this heavy crown, and worn it well, and served the purpose we all hoped for.
Establishment intellectuals are only really intellectuals ( here in the USA is what I am talking about) when they sow discord in the minds of students pertaining to the wrong direction Western culture has taken.....they are falling short of the real duty of intellectuals the world over if they aren't......exercizing .....their intellect.
So, this is really a simple matter; We fcouldn't TRUST the intellectual elite to handle this effectively, they weren't in the 'right place', mentally.
Leary did what had to be done, and yes, it would have happened anyway, if not him, someone else.....my personal opinion is that it was a great thing he did, mistakes and all, because he ripped the power straight out of the authorities hands by 'open-sourcing' the LSD experience.
Those 'dirty, smelly hippies' did a brave, heroic thing; they staved off a group of power hungry war-mongerers in a time period when it was desperately needed to save some shred of the country....and what they did was instrumental to the whole cultural shift that took place at the end of the sixties.
It's a damn shame those fellas had more guts between any ten of them than this whole fucking COUNTRY does these days.
All this neo-conservative warpiggery could be STOPPED, dead in its tracks, by the very same tactics used back then, and everyone is OBLIVIOUS to this,which is a crying fucking shame.
The blueprints there, and there are no workers.
