Except the actual folks around the Golden Gate Park area do beat up, stab, shoot, and often kill people. These people aren't hippies in any sense of the word.

Except the actual folks around the Golden Gate Park area do beat up, stab, shoot, and often kill people. These people aren't hippies in any sense of the word. They're low-grade gangsters. War on drugs[1] is a cure far worse than the illness it tries to cure: It's one thing to idealise the hippie culture of the 60s, it's another to bend the facts of what GGP panhandle neighbourhood is really like to fit that narrative. I am sure there are actual hippies out there, but it's unlikely that they're in SF or even Berkeley. (Background: spent sometime time in Inner Sunset in ~2009-2010 and walked to Haight; know a lot of folks who also attended USF Law in that neighbourhood). [1] I'll also note that by drugs I generally don't mean marijuana. I have zero interest in marijuana, but to put it in the same category as heroin, cocaine, or meth seems odd. We do need to decriminalize the "harder" drugs as well for both moral and pragmatic reasons -- bulk of drug war violence (especially in the US border states and south of the US border) is not over marijuana.