I agree, but there's a qualitative difference here, in that the hippies that are the subject of this story don't tend to kill or even beat up people. I've never sold any weed, but I've known enough hippies to recognize that they're basically benign black market traders rather than organized criminals, and the fact that they are sidelined in a new market is a problem for them.
Lots of people (who were not hippies) were interested in buying weed, while hippies were happy to supply the willingness to take a moderate legal risk. However, non-hippies aren't all that interested in other things that hippies like, such as hemp weaving or handicrafts - at least, not to the extent of providing hippies with any sort of livable income. So the choice is to either supply other, more risky markets - in other states, or with 'harder' and potentially more dangerous drugs - or find some other kind of employment. But other kinds of employment aren't really compatible with being a hippie, and while I don't think that's a fantastic thing to aspire to I respect that some people would rather live simpler, non-materialistic lives, or part of their their lives, and this is increasingly hard to do in a society that fetishizes private property.
Except the actual folks around the Golden Gate Park area do beat up, stab, shoot, and often kill people. These people aren't hippies in any sense of the word. They're low-grade gangsters.
War on drugs[1] is a cure far worse than the illness it tries to cure:
It's one thing to idealise the hippie culture of the 60s, it's another to bend the facts of what GGP panhandle neighbourhood is really like to fit that narrative. I am sure there are actual hippies out there, but it's unlikely that they're in SF or even Berkeley.
(Background: spent sometime time in Inner Sunset in ~2009-2010 and walked to Haight; know a lot of folks who also attended USF Law in that neighbourhood).
[1] I'll also note that by drugs I generally don't mean marijuana. I have zero interest in marijuana, but to put it in the same category as heroin, cocaine, or meth seems odd. We do need to decriminalize the "harder" drugs as well for both moral and pragmatic reasons -- bulk of drug war violence (especially in the US border states and south of the US border) is not over marijuana.
Obviously I'm generalizing, and I quite agree that there are 'low level gangsters' as well (though I think you're rather overstating your case). Not trying to one-up you, but I've lived almost 20 years in the Bay Area, most of that time in SF and most of that in the Sunset. I'm intimately familiar with the the Haight, hippie subculture etc.
Actually a depressingly large amount of the drug war or Mexican border violence IS now over marijuana; specifically over smuggling routes, and most of the pot violence in California is Mexican or Mexican Mafia related. The demand is so big that the cartels got into it, and they can capture a lot more of the value than with cocaine.
Lots of people (who were not hippies) were interested in buying weed, while hippies were happy to supply the willingness to take a moderate legal risk. However, non-hippies aren't all that interested in other things that hippies like, such as hemp weaving or handicrafts - at least, not to the extent of providing hippies with any sort of livable income. So the choice is to either supply other, more risky markets - in other states, or with 'harder' and potentially more dangerous drugs - or find some other kind of employment. But other kinds of employment aren't really compatible with being a hippie, and while I don't think that's a fantastic thing to aspire to I respect that some people would rather live simpler, non-materialistic lives, or part of their their lives, and this is increasingly hard to do in a society that fetishizes private property.