ReZoom

We hear from someone who helped establish a lasting legacy after the "Summer of Love," 40 years ago in San Francisco. Dr. David Smith founded free clinics.

A confluence of events created the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. It actually began in January of 1967, but by that summer, hundreds of thousands of hippie kids had descended on the city. By July, the city was essentially overrun, and the Summer of Love was hitting critical mass. What started as a magical moment in time of communal accommodation and spiritual awakening was turning into massive cases of bad drug experiences and rampant gonorrhea.

Dr. David Smith founded Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic to help the overrun municipal emergency rooms. The legacy of the Summer of Love for him is more than 2,000 free clinics nationwide, a movement that began with a group of volunteers and new idea in the city by the bay.

For this installment of "I Remember," we checked in with Dr. Smith.

"I didn't have one political thought in my life, my grandparents were Okie farmers, my mother was nurse. I was the least likely guy to become an activist. But I became a non-violent activist.

"At the time, I lived in the middle of Haight-Ashbury, an eight-square-block area. I lived two blocks down from the Grateful Dead and around the corner from Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane. I also ran the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital, and I started noticing all these kids coming into the ER in the middle of bad acid trips. What I noticed was that their friends did a better job helping them when they talked them down than we did with conventional treatment. That led us to pioneer the "talk-down" (treatment), which is still used today.

"We started what we called a hippie clinic, a new type of medical facility run by volunteers June 7. Joan Baez used to come and play guitar for our patients.

"At the time it was all 'drop acid, see God, have sex; protest the war, bond with one another, have sex,' so, you had thousands of young people taking LSD, having bad trips and getting gonorrhea. We would go into the hippie crash pads and everybody in the house would have VD.

"By August, leaders of many of the movements were telling the transplants to go back home. Along with peace, dope and the clap, the Summer of Love had brought in a criminal element.

"There is a dark side of that time, but there are people from that time that started doing great things. It changed people's lives. Then things just got so, jammed, it was kind of like the whole area was an event.

"We predicted the large number of kids and the bad trips and VD, but we didn't predict the dark side: the hoodies, the exploiters. That took me by surprise. What we didn't predict is that it would turn bad so fast."

Smith is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Free Clinic movement this month by opening a new clinic in New Orleans.

Want more? Read our previous installment: "I Remember: The Race to Space" or check out our Nostalgia channel.