Hey if you remember the summer of love .... you were not there.
Have you read Ted Nugent's op-ed piece on this same subject? It is well worth the read.
I was close. In '67 I was in navigator/nav bomb training, USAF, at Mather AFB in Sacramento.
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.
My son was conceived in 1967 in Golden Gate park, SF. I'm happy to announce he has a PhD in Physics. All of us there weren't losers.