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My father entered the Army in January 1967. Went through basic at Fort Dix, and then served the rest of his stint at Fort Knox.

Within a year of his entrance into the Army, a good portion of his hometown was burned to the ground (Newark, NJ, which was in flames fourty years ago today), and he tried marijuana for the first (and only) time while on weekend with the guys in his company. From 1967-68 grass swept the domestic posts.

What my father saw coming back with the guys from Nam, however, was much harder stuff. He knew of guys who smuggled back heroin and hashish via their body casts (he spent time in an Army hospital in late 1968).

By the time my father was discharged in San Francisco in '69 (due to a mistaken diagnosis of cancer), it was if the entire world had truly done a 180 in the two years since he was drafted. Between the dope coming back with our soldiers (and their addictions), and the huge number of underage, drug addicted prostitutes he saw running around San Fran, it was if his country had changed more dramatically than at any period in his life, before or since.

Maybe some Freeper boomers can share their perspective.

Wow. I was making a joke (a really bad one). I actually was the family called “Goldwater girls”. Seems really silly now.

I was living in Santa Barbara, it was a very tough time, those days...not all flowers and sweetness....

I went to San Francisco in the summer of ‘64 to visit an aunt and uncle. I was 23, a straight laced girl from Texas. Cousins showed me around SF and I saw some things that I could never have imagined before. This kind of stuff had not even been in the news to my knowledge, communes, houses full of drug addled hippies, people, stoned kids laying in the street, the most outlandish clothes and hair. We ate lunch at a department store restaurant in downtown SF. Something made me sick and they took me to a place in the department store that had beds and a nurse so I could lay down for a bit. I wonder if the cousins put something in my food when I wasn’t looking. I had never taken drugs of any kind (still haven’t) and I didn’t think of that at the time but now I wonder.