Happy Nice Mall

Their Mexican neighbors were stunned. Zihuatanejo historian Rodrigo Campus Aburto, a young teenager in the 1960s, remembers that the community mostly thought American trippers were crazy. He also remembers older youth who sometimes attend the festivities IFIF hosts on the beach. This is how “moon, fire and beer” defines parties. Some smoked marijuana (the state of Guerrero was then and still a major marijuana-producing region), but the “sacred ceremony” that IFIF people refer to as their LSD was not shared with locals.

It was decades before the rise of drug trafficking that led to murderous violence and destruction in Mexico. IFIF’s only rule was that people in LSD did not leave campus, and all current accounts seem to have followed suit.

According to a Saturday Evening Post article published in the fall of 1963, one or two people suffered from malfunctions in Mexico City hospitals, “Mind-Disrupting Drugs: The Bizarre Myth of LSD.”

On June 13, 1963, the Mexican government officially gave the group 20 days to leave the country. It is unclear exactly what led to the deportation. “They broke the law,” said Mr. Aburto. The Saturday Evening Post reported that Leary, as it is now known, had the group deported after reading an article about LSD at the Biomedical Research Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The scandalous director found his speech “ridiculous, confused, worthless” and protested the Mexican government.

Alongside the Mexican feds, the group faced a more primitive challenge. 60 percent of the group were men, and California psychiatrist and always empirical observer Dr. Downing dryly noted that “marriage imbalance characterizes many.”

Psychologist Mr. Weil brought his wife to the community and was among the few participants whose marriage had survived. “I remember a kind of loosening of sexual boundaries,” she said. “It was like a love feast”

Did the Zihuatanejo Project achieve its goals? Mr. Weil isn’t sure. “As I think now, the goal was to create a denser network, a more concentrated group that could get the job done. How naive we were in our belief that we could change the world overnight!”