There's plenty of "hippies" that used heroin, speed, cocaine etc. There's some who stuck with psychedelics and pot, and there's everything in between that...
IME, a lot of people who grew their hair out, experimented with drugs, were into music and grew up in the sixties consider themselves hippies....And there were millions of people that fit that description back then...Were all these people "true hippies"? Is it even a valid term to use?
The discussion about what would make someone a real a hippie and what would exclude someone from that is an annoying discussion that would just generate a huge argument....
There were some people that dropped everything they were doing and devoted themselves to being part of this "cultural revolution", whether it was hardcore political activism, wandering around meeting up with like minded people and just trying to experience something new, or going in the woods and living on a commune....
I think the original, true "hippies" were the people who happened to be living in certain parts of California and happened to be in certain social circles where LSD was distributed....and maybe everyone who showed up there and became a part of that group until maybe '66 or somewhere along those lines(don't have a timeline in my head memorized)...If anyone could be considered the "true hippies" that's who I would consider it to be....not that that makes them better than anyone who came after or who never really completely dropped out...but I would consider the original '60s hippies to be a fairly small group....
There were pockets of people everywhere in the US and Europe by the late '60s early '70s living out all sorts of variations of the "cultural revolution" that you could call hippies also....And they were just as varied in how they lived and dressed and acted and what drugs they took as anybody is....
the original hippie movement in California looked down on hard drugs, that was the party line...but that doesn't mean their weren't a lot of them that were playing around with them...or eventually even got into them going forward...
My uncle was a Vietnam vet who saw combat...had severe PTSD and eventually committed suicide years later....He had long hair, believed in reincarnation...smoked pot, used heroin at times, stayed close to his friends that fought in Vietnam too, but I wouldn't really consider him a hippy...
I think most of the books about the sixties just re-hash the same shit with the same characters over and over and over....The musical aspect of it as well...how many years after their death are John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix gonna be on the cover of Rolling Stone and other magazines....
I think at this point, "the '60s" have actually been made smaller in peoples minds than it actually was....It was a really fucking complicated era!
But yeah, some hippies did take speed....Shit, bikers definitely took it, but they took LSD and drank and did everything else too, but they're not really hippies!
When I think of hippies now, I think of spirituality and vegetarianism, kindly old college professor types who live these amazingly enlightened lives....trying to share knowledge and make the world a better place to live, but that version of "hippy" wouldn't be caught dead doing speed!
It's a confusing topic, definitely...
