I'm no expert on drugs, but I was just out of college in 1960 and my husband was still a student. I was in that environment, but not hanging around with the "experiment with your mind and body" crowd. I just happened to live in Berkeley because my husband was enrolled there. Pot was NOT common. In fact, I'd say Pot was rare in 1960. Nice people didn't do pot. Pot was considered something that Mexican illegals did. Heroin was around, but (again) nice people did not do heroin, or cocaine. That was for bums in NYC.
People, who wanted to get wasted, drank -- lots of beer, hard liquor, etc. Wine wasn't even very popular among the young crowd because people hadn't been educated to drink wine yet. California had a Wine Advisory Board that sponsored wine tastings for charity to educate people on choosing the proper wine to go with their food. But, you never found college students, or young adults, drinking wine. Beer, vodka, scotch, bourbon. Those were the drugs that were common.
But,by 1963, LSD had been created. And people like Timothy Leary were telling young folks that it was a harmless high and fun -- better than liquor. I don't think it was illegal then. And then kids started bringing back pot, cocaine, hash and all kinds of other substances back from their adventures on spring break. Folks started walking out of 2nd story windows because they thought they could fly, etc.(Art Linkletter's daughter)
I remember that my husband had just graduated from Engineering school in June 1963, and we were looking for a house in Berkeley because I was expecting another child. Our flat was getting too small, and the neighborhood was going down hill. I took the babies out for a walk one morning and I found a man passed out in the middle of the street from some drug overdose. My husband said, "That's it. We're out of here. We're not raising our kids here." We made an offer on a house that very weekend on borrowed money.
But it was a shock. I'd never seen ANYBODY "out of it" in Berkeley before. Little did I know that it would get much, much worse, or that house we bought wouldn't have been in Berkeley!
Yep, now I remember....the Beatles hit Ed Sullivan in 1964 IIRC, and I decided, at a tender age, that boys were interesting and fell madly in love with Paul (Michelle, ma belle). Right after that is when the drug scene went viral and I started wearing almost white lipstick, applied after I got to school.