Heads and Freaks: Patterns and Meanings of Drug Use Among Hippies

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Abstract
An emerging social typology among Haight-Ashbury [San Francisco, California, USA] hippies is the as yet largely implicit distinction drawn by them between "heads" and "freaks." At the simple denotative level the former refers to regular users of LSD [lysergic acid diethylamide], the latter to those who regularly "shoot speed" (inject Methedrine). These terms have, however, acquired great referential elasticity and connote different hippie life-styles along with their associated philosophical and attudinal outlooks. From the vantage-point of this broadened socio-linguistic context, the terms refelct both differential sources of social recruitment to the "head" and "freak" drug use patterns as well as a prominent value tension within the hippie subculture between contemplative, inwardly-directed forms of "mind-expansion" and more hedonistically oriented forms of sensual excess.