Though they became ubiquitous only after The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), drugs can be found in all of Thomas Pynchon’s novels. In connection with hippies, however, the hemp-smoking George Washington in Mason & Dixon (1997) and the many mentions of those fin de siècle drugs opium, laudanum, and absinthe in Against the Day (2006) must remain outside the picture, as the periods in which those two novels are set come well before the 1967 “Summer of Love.” Even The Crying of Lot 49, though it features Mucho Maas’ “therapeutic” use of LSD, is more attuned to mock-Hemingwayesque alcohol-abuse (Oedipa’s motel night with Metzger, for example) than the systematic, almost encyclopedic, use of psychotropic substances one finds in Inherent Vice (2009). The latter, with its “companion piece” Vineland (1990), may be read as Pynchon’s hippie (rather than “freak,” insofar as one can find freaks in virtually every page of his fictions) diptych, a sort of subset of the so-called California Trilogy (which also includes The Crying of Lot 49). Here the connection between the hippie lifestyle and drugs is not just in the foreground but acutely anatomized, especially in Inherent Vice. A survey of drugs and hippies in Pynchon’s oeuvre should thus start with Vineland, and then proceed through his 2009 hard-boiled narrative (or noir, as both definitions may apply to it).