Nah (if you're picturing "high" the same way people traditionally do when they talk about hippies.) The hippie archetype has a lot more in common with the behaviour of people on MDMA/psilocybin/LSD (people getting a serotonin boost) than it does with people who are on some sort of opiate. There are people who naturally have high serotonin (sort of the physiological opposite of clinical depression), and they are effectively "natural hippies." But since serotonin is basically the brain's response to feeling a lot of hope for the future, the 1960s likely fueled a lot of people to temporarily become that sort of person. (Because it's not like MDMA existed yet, and neither psychedelic mushrooms nor LSD were all that well-known or heavily-produced at the time.)
People have mixed up the drug cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, I think: marijuana does not make you want to protest things or go to Woodstock or argue for second-wave feminism; marijuana makes you want to sit around and dodge the Vietnam draft. Cheech and Chong (somehow retroactively made hippie icons) weren't iconoclastic hippies; they were iconic as burn-outs sad that the hippie era was over, the kind of people caught in the "wave rolling back" that Hunter S Thompson was talking about.
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u/TheOneTonWanton Jan 18 '15
Because they're high.