The story of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic is a confusing story to tell, because it involves two Smiths who ran in the same circles, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer, and David Smith, no relation, the charismatic creator of the clinic:
David Elvin Smith grew up in the dusty farm community of Bakersfield, California, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. When he moved to the Bay Area in 1960 to study at UC Berkeley, Smith was, by his own admission, a hick. He’d never traveled much beyond his backwoods town, and he lacked the political and intellectual curiosity that animated Berkeley’s sophisticated, international student body. Had it not been for his pushy peers, always scolding him for missing their sit-ins and marches, Smith probably wouldn’t have noticed the dawn of the Free Speech movement on his own campus. Later, he liked to remember a teaching assistant who canceled class so he and the other students could head to a protest downtown. Smith refused to join. He wanted to study for an upcoming test. The TA told him he’d never get an A if he didn’t go.
Smith has been open about his louche behavior in this period: an inveterate womanizer and a binge drinker, he disappeared for days at a time on benders, nevertheless graduating at the top of his class. At the end of 1965, a debilitating blackout and a messy breakup led him to give up alcohol. By then, Smith, a raffish, good-looking man of twenty-six, was a postdoctoral student at UC San Francisco and the chief of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Screening Unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Later he remembered his curiosity flaring as his research collided with the city’s cultural upheaval. “I was injecting white rats with LSD in the lab,” he said, “and then I’d walk home past the Haight, where I’d see kids who were high on the same substance.”
He began to experiment with psychedelics himself, and he liked them. The lifestyle brought new friends and new politics. He and his friends tracked the burgeoning counterculture in the Haight, where some were predicting an influx of 100,000 young people in the coming year. Smith, who felt that health care was a right, wondered where the newcomers would receive medical attention, and how they would afford it. He moved to Haight-Ashbury himself with plans to found a free clinic.
When it opened at 558 Clayton Street in June 1967, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC) was an immediate sensation. Staffed entirely by volunteers and unauthorized by the city health department, it treated hundreds of patients a day, offering nonjudgmental care for those suffering from bad trips, overdoses, sexually transmitted diseases, and malnourishment, or for those who just needed a kind ear. Lines at the HAFMC sometimes stretched around the block with hippies waiting to ascend the creaky wooden stairs to its second-floor office. Inside, loitering was encouraged. The clinic did everything it could to advertise its psychedelic affinities. Exam rooms were painted in aqua and Day-Glo orange; one of them was wallpapered with a vibrant collage of peace signs, naked bodies, and hypnotic swirls. Even as Smith struggled to pay the rent and keep the cops at bay, he reveled in his creation. Few things so perfectly encapsulated the utopian ideals of the summer of love.
As faces filed in and out of the clinic that summer, Smith and his colleagues befriended the repeat visitors, and the HAFMC became a scene within a scene. It could be hard to tell the hippies apart, with their long, beflowered hair, their upstart communes, their shifting legions of followers and leaders. But decades later, no one at the clinic had any trouble remembering Charlie Manson and his girls.
In 1971, David Smith published Love Needs Care, a memoir of the HAFMC’s germinal years. I found it rife with details about Manson and the Family, and about the very period that Bugliosi had omitted from Helter Skelter: the summer of love, when Manson, apparently at his most charismatic, began to attract followers and ensure their unconditional devotion. Better still, Love Needs Care had a few contributions from Roger Smith, offering his own appraisal of Manson.
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Love Needs Care attempts the delicate task of elucidating the Smiths’ relationships to Manson while making it seem as if they had no idea that he and his followers would someday erupt into unconscionable violence.
David Smith described the Family’s frequent trips to the HAFMC, where “Charlie’s girls,” as they were known around the halls, were treated for sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. The girls tended to Manson’s every need, never speaking unless spoken to. They referred to him as Christ, or “J.C.”
When the Family moved to an apartment on Cole Street, Manson began in earnest to “reprogram” his followers. David had an elaborate sense of Manson’s tactics, although he never explained where he got it. Using a combination of LSD and mind games, Manson forced his followers to submit to “unconventional sexual practices,” Smith wrote; he would invoke mysticism and pop psychology as the acid took hold, saying, “You have to negate your ego.” Treating the girls “like objects,” he eroded their independence, turning them “into self-acknowledged ‘computers,’ empty vessels that would accept almost anything he poured in.” Before long, they obeyed him unquestioningly.
Acid was unmistakably essential to the process. Manson’s insistence on it sometimes put him at odds with trends in the Haight, David thought. Typically, hippies who dropped a lot of acid eventually moved on to speed. A schism grew in the scene. The “acid heads” (a phrase David claims to have coined) favored nonviolence, whereas the “speed freaks” (ditto) caused the rash of violence that destroyed the Haight’s live-and-let-live ethos. But Manson had an aversion to needles; he wouldn’t use amphetamines. The Family’s drug pattern was effectively reversed, with Manson urging his disciples to relinquish speed and embrace acid. Weaning his recruits from amphetamines reduced the chance of interference with his induction process.
Speed became a part of the Family’s lifestyle only later, David told me, when it came time to kill in Los Angeles. He’d heard this from Susan Atkins herself, when she asked him to assess her mental health for a parole hearing in 1978. “When they went to the south, they got very deeply involved in speed,” he said. They got it from the Hells Angels. “They were trading sex for speed, and [Atkins] thinks that Helter Skelter and the ultimate crime was a paranoid speed delusion.”
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Both the Smiths have said that Manson’s fear of needles made speed a nonissue, but obviously speed can be taken orally or snorted. Over the years, a smattering of evidence and firsthand recollections has suggested that the Family used amphetamines more often than was suggested at the time. In a 2009 documentary, Linda Kasabian claimed that she and her companions each swallowed a “capsule” of speed before leaving for Cielo Drive on the night of Sharon Tate’s murder. (At the trial, she testified that she hadn’t taken any drugs around the time of the murders.) In books and at parole hearings, Susan Atkins also later copped to taking speed before the Tate murders. Tex Watson wrote that he frequently snorted it with the group, and that he, too, took it on both nights of the murders. Others added that the Family kept an abundance of speed at the Spahn Ranch toward the end of their time there, and that Manson himself wasn’t above taking it, especially as he grew more paranoid. He would use it to stay up for days at a time, brooding on his delusions.
Remember, Manson lived in the Haight because Roger Smith sent him there, thinking its “vibes” would assuage the ex-con’s hostility. And make no mistake: Roger did believe that Manson was hostile. In a short essay for Life magazine published months after the murders, Roger offered his first-ever insights about Manson. (“ He speaks of Manson here out of his extensive unofficial contact with him,” the magazine noted, without describing the nature of that contact or any potential conflict with Smith’s parole duties.) “Charlie was the most hostile parolee I’ve ever come across,” Roger wrote. “He told me right off there was no way he could keep the terms of his parole. He was headed back to the joint and there was no way out of it.”
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But his remark about Manson’s hostility always stayed with me. I’d already seen, after all, how he’d characterized Manson in official parole documents as a well-behaved guy making “excellent progress.” The disparity suggested that Roger had been willing to sweep Manson’s “hostility” under the rug.
In a passage he contributed to Love Needs Care, Roger did his best to support the idea that the bizarreries of the Haight suited an ex-con like Manson. Daily LSD trips made him mellower, more thoughtful. He still had the slick duplicitousness of a con man, and he was still a master manipulator, but he was suddenly fond of vacuous self-help bromides like “If you love everything, you don’t need to think about what bothers you.”
Roger Smith couldn’t seem too credulous, so he made sure to note the “messianic” tilt of Manson’s acid days—an oblique acknowledgment of Charlie’s growing megalomania. David Smith mirrored the sentiment, writing that Manson’s LSD trips replaced his “underlying depression with a manic smile” that sometimes betrayed darker philosophies. David admitted that Manson “began to develop a number of delusions as his involvement with LSD progressed.” He fantasized about the Beatles ordaining him their musical equal; he imagined a Judgment Day when blacks would slaughter whites.
Some of Roger’s familiars, including his wife, couldn’t understand his affinity for Manson. Roger was “pretty much in awe of Charlie’s ability to draw these women to him,” one said. Another thought that he “was always kind of fascinated” with “the charming charismatic sociopath.”