HEADMONTON

Confirmed Hippies Recount Drug Tales From City's Past

Long before the jackboots stomped down, Edmonton was a pretty groovy little
town. Not everyone who lived through the love years recalls them perfectly,
but most everyone agrees that marijuana, hash, acid, mushrooms, MDA,
psilocybin, mescaline and peyote were used in the name of expanding
consciousness and making things shine, rather than just for the sake of
getting wasted.

Tom Doran, co-owner of the Jupiter Cannabis Culture on Whyte was, and still
arguably is, a hippie. His wife managed one of the city's first head shops,
the Hippogriff. Meanwhile, Doran, with his band Django, left Edmonton to
pursue greater things in Vancouver. It was there that he ran into another
Edmontonian, as crucial to the continuation of drug culture as Freak
Brothers comics. Says Doran: "Poppa Chong, Tommy's dad, used to own this
hippie club called the Parlour. I used to work with them, before they became
Cheech and Chong. Cheech was a draft dodger or something, an actor from L.A.
He just kind of latched on to everybody. Well, they decided they were going
to do little skits for the club next door, called the Smilin' Buddha."

Having witnessed the birth of the underground legends, Doran thinks of those
times as having tremendous innocence, and he said the police were rarely
interested in what people were doing in their spare time. "It wasn't a very
heavy time. I had a little house right on the corner of 67 Ave. and 109 St.,
in full view of the street. I was a single guy and always had lots of
friends partying there, always doing some mind-altering things. We had some
pretty wild parties, but I was never bothered by the police. Maybe it was
just the time; there truly was a lot of peace and love in the air. There
wasn't that sort of sense of possible violence back then. I think because we
didn't cause much trouble, the police didn't care about what we did.
Although," Doran laughs, "when I left to go to Vancouver in '69, they raided
the place two weeks later."

Peter Montgomery, who lived in Edmonton until the '70s and now teaches
English at a community college in Victoria, agrees with Doran in that it was
largely musicians, actors and artists who were into drugs. "You had to know
the right people," he says over the phone. "It was pretty big, but it was
also private and secret. There weren't a lot of grow operations, I think a
lot of it was imported. Everybody had it, so it couldn't have been too
expensive. Drugs weren't a really bothersome item for the police. Being an
alcoholic was. There was a lot of marijuana floating around the Yardbird,
where Tommy Banks and his jazz band played. People would have big parties
when the new Beatles or Rolling Stones came out. Culture was a lot more
centralized at the time; everyone knew what was happening with the big
bands, everyone got excited about the same things at the same time. I was
skeptical of movements. Being a war baby, I was suspicious of Nazis, of any
time too many people got together and thought the same things."

Gordon Drever, currently a professor of Anthropology at Athabasca University
and Northern Lakes College, was a self-described Marxist in university and
says politics also influenced his experimentation, "Marxists have a very
puritanical attitude so it was a big thing to make the jump to indulgence
with drugs."

From his home just outside Edmonton, Drever explains that drugs didn't
really hit the city until '67, when they exploded onto the scene, and he
points out that the psychedelically-decked out hippies you might expect were
an exception rather than the rule. "In the late '60s what we saw was a
movement from formal dressing to casual-scruffy dressing," he explains. "The
arrival of drugs was part of that same transition."

The most exposure to the State side brand of flower children he remembers
came in the form of some kids from Indiana who made their way through town
"in a Volkswagen van painted with cosmic symbols and genitalia." They sold
bags of marijuana out of the van to fund their Western Canadian tour.

Drever recalls most of his acid trips involving going to movies. Almost
three decades after he'd seen The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, he was
rummaging through the aisles in a local bookstore when he heard a
long-forgotten woman's laugh. After getting a closer look at the cackle's
origin, he realized she had been the young woman sitting a row ahead of him
in the theatre ("talk about an acid flashback!" he says).

Whether it was acid, mushrooms or pot, Drever says he could get them from
acquaintances at the university housing co-op where he lived. It was,
apparently, possible to get all three and more from the same guy. The cops
weren't a big issue if you were discreet, he adds. They didn't stop the
"cock and cunt" van from selling weed at the U of A, after all.

Of course, rumours that people are still experimenting with drugs in and
around the university are, of course, entirely anecdotal. But suffice it to
say that the paranoid war on drugs, complete with salary-paying marijuana
tickets issued by the modern fuzz, is still a source of great amusement and
eye-rolling for those involved.