Inevitably, just as Anslinger had targeted jazz musicians and film stars, so did law-enforcement agencies now go after rock stars, looking as much for the publicity as the need to uphold the law. Members of The Grateful Dead were : arrested for marijuana possession on 2 October 1967 when the band's communal house was raided. Many others followed, pressure groups like MOTOREDE, The Movement to Restore Decency, proclaiming rock music to be Communist inspired and glorifying drugs, destruction, revolution and sexual promiscuity. 

The year was also to be remembered for events that were held, often involving a good deal of marijuana and other drugs. In January, there occurred the Be-In, a rally of several tens of thousands of hippies by the Golden Gate Bridge. They gathered to make love, smoke marijuana and attend a rock concert with a line-up headed by Jefferson Airplane, one of the main acid rock bands. The proceedings ended with Gary Snyder blowing on a conch shell and Allen Ginsberg calling for the litter to be collected, and the huge television coverage of the event turned Ginsberg into a household name, not so much as a poet as a political activist. Other events and be-ins followed then, in June, the Monterey International Pop Festival was held. It lasted three days and featured, amongst others,Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Otis Redding, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and The Animals. It was a forerunner of probably the greatest rock music gathering of them all at Woodstock, near Bethel in upstate New York in the August of 1969 when many of the same performers made repeat appearances. Half a million people attended the weekend-long event, thousands of them carrying and smoking marijuana. The whole weekend passed off peacefully - if somewhat chaotically, with 20-mile traffic jams and deep mud caused by a rainstorm - in a mood of self-indulgent promiscuity and hedonism. A comment made by a doctor manning a voluntary medical aid post summed up the hippy ethos and mood of the time. During the whole weekend, he had not had to treat one single violence-induced injury - not so much as a bloody nose and he wondered aloud what it might have been like had the five hundred thousand people there been alcohol-drinking sports fans. 

It was not always quite so peaceful, however: 1969 saw the curtain start to fall on what the press were dubbing the hippy, peacenik, flower-power, free-love decade. A number of events occurred that showed the world was changing yet again and cast an ill light upon hippies. Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, ordered the authorities to drive criminal anarchists and latter-day Fascists off the campuses, prompting massive student unrest which forced him to declare a state of emergency. A week before Woodstock, Charles Manson and his hippy 'Family' murdered Sharon Tate and others, The Weathermen (who took their name from a line in Bob Dylan's song 'Subterranean Homesick Blues') organized Days of Rage in Chicago, leading to three deaths and three hundred arrests and finally, on Christmas Eve, The Rolling Stones gave a free concert at the Altamont Speedway, north-east of Livermore, 20 miles due east of San Francisco, where the Hell's Angels, employed as security guards, lost control of the audience and themselves and killed an eighteen-year-old called Meredith Hunter. 

The hippy era might have been coming to an end but its primary spokesperson, Allen Ginsberg, was as vociferous as ever. Manipulating the media, he stridently advocated an end to the Vietnam War and the legalization of marijuana, regarding the hippies or their philosophy as a means to transforming American society. To those in the counter-cultural world, he was an elder statesman, a voice speaking on their behalf from a position of unbiased authority. For the establishment, he was a prominent pro-drug subversive. He was not, however, alone in his subversion.