Permissiveness on trial: Sex, drugs, rock, the Rolling Stones, and the sixties counterculture

This article examines how a 1967 scandal involving drug-taking among popular musicians catalyzed a debate between its principal participants—the Rolling Stones, politicians, the press, the courts, and the counterculture—about what was and was not permissible in matters of personal conduct, individual liberty, and social responsibility. These discussions reveal the provisional, contested, and circumscribed quality of permissiveness in 1960s Britain, which was nonetheless becoming a more diverse and pluralistic society. Permissiveness was not a monolithic cause and existing models of it—whether they stress its marginality or its magnitude, its malign or benign effects—risk simplifying a constellation of behaviors and beliefs championed by different interests for different reasons.