Commissioner Kratz is reportedly the person who coined the term "anti-hippie ordinance" and noted that the recent repeal of the law is part of a clean-up effort meant to organize the county's laws and make them easily searchable via a classification system. During this process, commissioners found many "old ordinances and resolutions that simply haven't withstood the test of time," mostly related to old road signs and traffic laws.
The idea of making laws with the express purpose of foiling hippie music festivals seems pretty funny now, but there's actually a complicated and disturbing legacy surrounding what might also be called "anti-hippie ordinances." According to the San Francisco Chronicle, then-United States president Richard Nixon "began the 'War on Drugs' in 1969 as a weapon to use against antiwar hippies and African Americans."
In 1994, Nixon aide John Ehrlichman confessed that the administration had purposefully worked at "getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily" in order to "disrupt those communities." The effects of criminalizing drug use in order to destabilize and harm minority communities continue to this day.
