In May 1966, Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone of the American folk-rock band the Lovin' Spoonful were arrested in San Francisco, California, for possessing one ounce (28 g) of marijuana. The Spoonful were at the height of their success, and Yanovsky, a Canadian, worried that a conviction would lead to his deportation and a breakup of the band. To avoid this eventuality, he and Boone cooperated with law enforcement, revealing their drug source to an undercover agent at a party a week after their initial arrest.
The Lovin' Spoonful were the first popular music act of the 1960s to be busted for possessing illegal drugs.[1] Boone and Yanovsky's drug source, Bill Loughborough, was arrested in September 1966, and he initiated a campaign to boycott the band. By early 1967, Yanovsky and Boone's cooperation was widely reported in the West Coast's burgeoning underground rock press, souring the Spoonful's reputation within the counterculture and generating tensions within the band. Yanovsky's bandmates fired him in May 1967, and the band subsequently saw diminished commercial success. In January 1968, Loughborough was sentenced to three months in county jail followed by three years of probation, and the Spoonful dissolved that June.
- ^ Matijas-Mecca 2020, p. 148.