There, fixed it. If he said it wasn't about drugs, it wasn't about drugs.
This is somewhat of a rewriting of history by someone who probably wasn’t there.
Nobody back in the early to mid 60s had any serious belief that the song was about drugs.
I knew it through a regular feature on Captain Kangaroo where an artist would sketch scenes of the song as it played. No way the good Captain would have permitted that if the song was about drugs.
No, the song was a good, clean, wholesome song about shooting VC out the side door of a C-47.