Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

by Hunter S. Thompson

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas.

Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it’s all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple-red convertible … stoned, ripped, twisted … Good People.

It is a weird feeling to sit in a Las Vegas hotel at four in the morning—hunkered down with a notebook and a tape recorder in a $75-a-day suite and a fantastic room service bill, run up in forty-eight hours of total madness—knowing that just as soon as dawn comes up you are going to flee without paying a fucking penny

Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop.

The idea of going completely crazy on laughing gas in the middle of a DAs’ drug conference had a definite warped appeal.

If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented.

These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni.

When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don’t waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.

There was evidence, in this room, of excessive consumption of almost “every type of drug known civilized made since 1544 A.D. It could only be explained as a montage, a sort of exaggerated medical exhibit, put together very carefully to show what might happen if twenty-two serious drug felons—each with a different addiction—were penned up together in the same room for five days and nights, without relief.