I have a long association with the Wharf Rats. I'm the guy who tended to get stuck making sure there were taken care of, had tables and chairs to set up, seeing to it that they got in, making sure they had a space to hold the meeting in. They are (for the most part) very gentle, extremely sincere, trying very hard, nice as hell and ultimately 100% utterly misguided and playing Russian Roulette with five chambers full. Not to put too fine a point on it or anything, but if you want to stop being a drunk, the first thing to do is get the hell out of the bar. If you're having problems with drugs, then a Grateful Dead concert is the last place on earth, or in all known history you should ever be. Drugs at those events are not 'plentiful', it's like water in the ocean, the essence and very fabric it's built out of. It is possible to do those shows and that 'scene' without drugs*, just like you can go to the ocean and walk on the beach and avoid getting wet, but they want to surf and still somehow stay dry, and it's a way bad idea.
Hell, living in Humbolt if you have problems with drugs and are trying to stay 'clean and sober' is a pretty monumental bad idea too - what wine is to Napa, what potatoes are to Idaho, oranges to Florida and corn to Iowa, so pot is to Humbolt. Humbolt's connection to pot is like Detroit's to automobiles - the ground zero for the growing/manufacturing, the basic infrastructure of nationwide pot distribution network, the bank for a lot of the money (and it's California's number one cash crop) and the corporate headquarters too. More than all the 12 Step Meetings ever held, these people will benefit more from changing more things in their lives than just 'not using drugs' if they really want to recover.
Yeah, it's trans-friendly - at least when compared to most other places in the USA. That's not because of Arcadia, it's because Arcadia is Northern California, and NorCal very liberal. Yet, given the entirity of Northern California, I don't think it's as open, accepting and truly liberal as Sonoma, Marin, San Francisco, Oakland, and Santa Cruz. Because behind all those people walking around stoned and wearing shirts that look like a rainbow threw up on them, is a large population of people who've been there a hella lot longer than the hippies, and while pot has become a big business, fishing and timber which used to be the chief source of cash flow, are all but dead, and those families are broke, disappointed, disillusioned, and bitter, and even when times were good, they were closer to rednecks, than latte liberals. And I'm not all that sold on the neo-hippies up there being all that liberal and caring, I just think they are too stoned to care because overwhelming apathy is one of marijuana's major side effects.
It is though exactly the kind of place I was looking to go to for college, though spectacularly beautiful, sublime in the extreme, it's got zero social stuff, no culture, no entertainment, no 'distractions' other than reefer. And as I said it's got a few programs that are the best in the nation. But it's only a few, and pretty rare ones at that.
* - I know what you're thinking. You are wondering how I went through that, lived in the belly of the beast and still work with and for 'the scene' and not wind up in WarfRats aren't you? Easy, though the saying is: Drugs, Sex and Rock and Roll, anyone who has tried to do the first two seriously has found you can do one, or the other, but not both. So I avoided most of the hard core drug stuff because I was far more interested in banging big titted hippie chicks, tour bunnies and the home town sausage jamboree girls who were ever-present, highly suggestible, and morally disabled. A choice between spending the evening dosed so I could taste color and see music or discovering new levels of sexual perversion and kinky sex required no choice at all on my part.
