Ahira's Hangar

This little novel was originally published in 1968, three years after the classic Dune. And it shares a couple of big ideas with that novel, though this one is set in current (1960's) day rural California. A researcher from U-Cal Berkeley named Gilbert Dasein travels to a very isolated community in rural California called Santaroga. He is being payed to do research there, but his real motive is to meet up with the girl from that community named Jenny, whom he once knew at college, and with whom he is deeply in love. Santaroga is a very independent place, where they produce their own food, where outside food and drink is not allowed in, outsiders are not allowed to buy homes there, and researchers seem to have a way of ending up dead. And anyone who leaves to join the military or go to college ends up going back, just as Jenny did.

It turns up that there is a naturally occurring substance (called Jaspers) that gets into the food and drink that alters the body and mind, and is ridiculously addictive.

Like Dune, here Herbert explores the effects of a community wide addiction to a naturally occurring super drug...

Only here, there is a question about whether or not Jaspers forms a subconcious group mind, whether it has a mind of its own, and whether or not it takes away your free will and forces you to do bad deeds that you are not even aware that you are doing...

I coulda sworn I'd read that book, but nothing you said there seems familiar in the slightest. I'm gonna have to go looking for these missing Herberts.

--A