“I never believed in that guru trip”: Why Hunter S. Thompson hated drug culture
As one of the 20th century’s most prominent cultural commentators, the trailblazing Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was, in many ways, a less fictitious and less principled version of Forrest Gump. I don’t intend to say that Thompson had a below-average IQ or that he was an international table tennis champion. But, like Gump, Thompson led a life that traced and embodied the complex cultural history of the US.
Thompson was a complex figure with a peculiar outlook on life. On paper, his profuse drug-taking, subversive journalism and taste for psychedelic rock music lumped him in with the liberal left. However, as an uncompromising embodiment of the American dream, he upheld several traditional values, including his advocacy for the right to bear arms.
When tackling Thompson’s literary oeuvre, which includes the non-fictional masterpiece Hell’s Angels and the semi-autobiographical rollercoaster Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his philosophical outlook becomes increasingly tangible. Thompson’s famous quote, “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught,” sheds a little light on the matter, suggesting that his liberal utopia was anarchic, with each man for himself.
Fundamentally, Thompson was an eccentric thrill-seeker, ready to get stuck in and put his life on the line, so long as it made for a good story. As a prolific cultural commentator during the countercultural revolution, he embraced just about everything, including his own insanity. “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me,” Thompson wryly stated in another of his famous quotes.
Anyone who has read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will know that Thompson took drugs with the profusion of a suicidal maniac. “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-coloured 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,” Thompson documented in the story. Supposedly, he enjoyed this mind-bending array of recreational substances, but at certain intervals, the abuse approached an auto-sadistic pitch.
Throughout Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and its neighbouring texts, Thompson revealed his passion for hippie-era music. Notably, he dedicated Fear and Loathing to Bob Dylan for his song’ Mr. Tambourine Man and was a devout fan of Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead. “If the Grateful Dead came to town, I’d beat my way in with a fucking tyre iron, if necessary,” he once informed John Lombardi.
The Grateful Dead were among the leading proponents of America’s hippie-age drug culture, their cult following intensely familiar with the consciousness-expanding qualities of LSD. Given Thompson’s penchant for drugs and The Grateful Dead, one might assume he endorsed the 1960s drug culture. Alas, one would be wrong.
In a 1974 interview with Playboy, Thompson curtly replied, “No. I never have,” when asked whether he believed in “drug culture”. Elaborating, he revealed that, although he took drugs, he “never believed in that guru trip; you know, God, nirvana, that kind of oppressive, hipper-than-thou bullshit.”
The hippies often sought spiritual enlightenment through the use of psychedelic drugs, but Thompson never bought it for a second. To him, LSD and mescaline were two viable options for entertainment on a rainy Sunday. “I like to just gobble the stuff right out in the street and see what happens, take my chances, just stomp on my own accelerator,” Thompson continued. “It’s like getting on a racing bike and all of a sudden you’re doing 120 miles per hour into a curve that has sand all over it and you think, ‘Holy Jesus, here we go,’ and you lay it over till the pegs hit the street and metal starts to spark.”
True to his mantra, Thompson was fearless enough to speed towards a blind corner and crazy enough to regard hospitalisation as a trifling setback. “If you’re good enough, you can pull it out, but sometimes you end up in the emergency room with some bastard in a white suit sewing your scalp back on,” he concluded.
