Reentry: a study of the movement of young drug users toward mainstream society

In the middle 1960s hundreds of thousands of young people dramatically left American mainstream society to join the hippie movement. Almost ten years after the height of the hippie phenomenon, there has been little longitudinal investigation of the predictions by social scientists that these young people would be lost from future mainstream involvement. In the late 1960s, through a study of young drug users in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, my colleagues and I began to assess the degree of movement taken by hippie drug users toward mainstream society. This research focused on the differential outcome of three groups of young drug users, approximately two and a half years after they were initially studied.