WATCH: When Laguna Beach Was the LSD Capital of the Universe

In these exclusive videos, writer Nick Schou, author of Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World (just released in paperback), takes Patch readers on a tour of several key locations from Laguna Beach's late-'60s/early-'70s heyday when the city became the international capital of LSD trafficking.

Hey—why isn't that in the tourist brochures?

Maybe it should be, it was quite a time. A time when a gaggle of surfers barely out of their teens formed the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which started out as a quasi-spiritual group but eventually evolved into a notorious drug cartel—nicknamed the Hippie Mafia—that made regular runs to Afghanistan, smuggling hashish in hollowed-out surfboards.

Laguna Beach was the Brotherhood's epicenter, in places like Laguna Canyon's Woodland Drive (dubbed Dodge City on account of all the police raids that took place there), South Laguna's Monterey Drive, where a Brotherhood member was fatally shot during a police raid (which made members realize just how dangerous their enterprise had become), and Mystic Arts World, a head shop on Coast Highway that was its defacto headquarters.

Then there was the Gathering of the Tribes rock fest over Christmas 1970, a Brotherhood-sponsored acid-washed (literally!) extravaganza held in the canyon about where the 73 toll road now runs. According to rumors, quite a stash is still buried there beneath the dirt ...

If you want more details—on how Jimi Hendrix got involved with the Brotherhood, on Timothy Leary's Woodland Drive bust that made the career of a future Laguna Beach police chief, and on why the mere mentioning of the name John Griggs is still a conversation-stopper in some Laguna Beach circles—you'll have to pick up Schou's book.

But meanwhile, check out these clips, which include four extended-length videos of Schou providing narration at several sites that you won't read about in most Laguna Beach travel stories.

Unless it's a piece in High Times magazine ...

ALSO: How famous was the Orange Sunshine brand of acid? Famous enough to get name-checked in a Saturday Night Live sketch some years later ... click it up above ...