Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

by

Hunter S. Thompson

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Drugs and American Society Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
American Culture and Counterculture Theme Icon
The American Dream Theme Icon
Drugs and American Society  Theme Icon
News and Journalism Theme Icon
Violence Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Drugs and American Society  Theme Icon

Nearly every page of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas mentions illegal drug use in some way, and when narrator and California journalist Raoul Duke is tasked with covering a local sporting event in Las Vegas, he takes with him his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, and a huge bag of drugs, including “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, [and] laughers.” While in Vegas, Duke is further tasked, ironically, with covering the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, where he finds countless Midwestern police lamenting “the Drug Culture” and falsely criminalizing drug users as violent, sex-crazed maniacs. Duke doesn’t see “the Drug Culture” as a problem to be fixed per se; rather, he maintains that drug use is a natural response to American society and culture. Through Duke’s drug-induced escapades, Thompson implies that Duke’s altered reality, no matter how awful, is preferable to the real-world experience of mainstream American society in the 1970s.

Despite Duke’s massive stockpile of drugs, Thompson does not offer a wholesale endorsement of drug use. Instead, he implies that drugs are hazardous and often unsafe. As Duke packs his car for Las Vegas after spending nearly his entire salary advance on acid and ether, he claims that they are “extremely dangerous drugs.” Duke makes plain from the beginning that his drug use is ill-conceived; however, Duke maintains that the only drug that really worries him is ether. “There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge,” Duke says. Obviously, Duke knows that using drugs, and abusing ether specifically, is a bad idea; he simply does it anyway. In turn, his drug use only leads to the need for more drugs—“not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain focus.” Thompson recognizes that drugs are indeed a slippery slope. As Duke and Dr. Gonzo hallucinate their way through Las Vegas, they decide that LSD is too much for the bustling and colorful city. “No. this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs,” Duke says. “Reality itself is too twisted.” Their drug-induced delusions are heightened against the chaotic backdrop of Las Vegas, and while Duke and Gonzo are fully aware of this, they continue to eat acid by the sheet-full. Of course, Duke and Dr. Gonzo’s acid trips only worsen and even seem likely to kill them.

Duke argues that his foolish use of drugs is prompted by American society and culture, and that drugs offer him a means of coping. To Duke, and by extension the rest of American drug users, drugs temper the sting of reality. At the beginning of Thompson’s book, Duke explains “the socio-psychic factor,” or the idea that “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. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun.” The complications and “weasels” that Duke mentions are references to American society, and drugs offer him a temporary escape from his painful reality.

Duke examines the national shift in American drug use from psychedelics in the 1960s to much harsher drugs in the 1970s, claiming that “the big market, these days, is in Downers. […] What sells today is whatever Fucks You Up—whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time.” Duke asserts that this shift is not unexpected or random but is linked to the country’s political climate. “‘Consciousness Expansion’ went out with LBJ…and it is worth noting, historically,” says Duke, “that downers came in with Nixon.” The election of a violent and corrupt president has led to America’s worsening drug epidemic, and Duke openly draws attention to this. According to Duke, “the Drug Culture” has “turned, with a vengeance, to skin-popping and even mainlining…and for every ex-speed freak who drifted, for relief, into smack, there are 200 kids who go straight to the needle off Seconal. They never even bother to try speed.” Thompson does not ignore or deny the mounting drug crisis in America, but in this vein, the crisis is less a self-indulgent habit and more a necessary evil to cope with the terrible state of American society.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas takes place during “this foul year of Our Lord, 1971,” which Duke describes as the “doomstruck era of Nixon.” Despite running for president on a platform of peace and change, Nixon has dragged the nation further into the violence of the Vietnam War, and things on the home front are not much better. The American counterculture and the civil rights movement combined were not enough to combat racism and sexism in American society, and because of these grim realities, Duke argues, America is “wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style.” In the end, Thompson acknowledges the seriousness of the drug problem in American society and posits that the violent and corrupt American government, along with the widespread injustices of traditional American culture, are largely to blame. Instead of fixing “the Drug Culture” directly, Thompson implies that once American society and politics are fixed, drug use will cease to be such a detrimental problem. Of course, it seems unlikely that America will ever be completely fixed in the way Duke imagines, and as such, Thompson suggests that “the Drug Culture” is here to stay.

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Drugs and American Society Quotes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Below you will find the important quotes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas related to the theme of Drugs and American Society .
Part 1, Chapter 1 Quotes

The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. 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.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker), Dr. Gonzo
Related Symbols: The Great Red Shark , The Bag of Drugs
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 8 Quotes

Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure. My attorney has never been able to accept the notion—often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation— that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker), Dr. Gonzo
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 12 Quotes

Yes, I would go back to Vegas. Slip the Kid and confound the CHP by moving East again, instead of West. This would be the shrewdest move of my life. Back to Vegas and sign up for the Drugs and Narcotics conference; me and a thousand pigs. Why not? Move confidently into their midst. Register at the Flamingo and have the White Caddy sent over at once. Do it right; remember Horatio Alger. . .

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker), The Hitchhiker
Related Symbols: The White Whale
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 3 Quotes

We would be attending the conference under false pretenses and dealing, from the start, with a crowd that was convened for the stated purpose of putting people like us in jail. We were the Menace—not in disguise, but stone-obvious drug abusers, with a flagrantly cranked-up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit . . . not to prove any final, sociological point, and not even as a conscious mockery: It was mainly a matter of life-style, a sense of obligation and even duty. If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker), Dr. Gonzo
Page Number: 109-10
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 7 Quotes

The first session—the opening remarks—lasted most of the afternoon. We sat patiently through the first two hours, although it was clear from the start that we weren’t going to Learn anything and it was equally clear that we’d be crazy to try any Teaching. It was easy enough to sit there with a head full of mescaline and listen to hour after hour of irrelevant gibberish. . .. There was certainly no risk involved. These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker), Dr. Gonzo
Page Number: 143
Explanation and Analysis:

“Hell, in Malibu alone, these goddamn Satan-worshippers kill six or eight people every day.” He paused to sip his drink. “And all they want is the blood,” he continued. “They’ll take people right off the street if they have to.” He nodded. “Hell, yes. Just the other day we had a case where they grabbed a girl right out of a McDonald’s hamburger stand. She was a waitress. About sixteen years old . . . with a lot of people watching, too!” “What happened?” said our friend. “What did they do to her?” He seemed very agitated by what he was hearing. "Do?" said my attorney. “Jesus Christ man. They chopped her goddamn head off right there in the parking lot! Then they cut all kinds of holes in her and sucked out the blood.”

Related Characters: Dr. Gonzo (speaker), Raoul Duke, The Georgia Cop
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 11 Quotes

But what is sane? Especially here in “our own country”—in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker)
Page Number: Book Page 178
Explanation and Analysis:

Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker)
Page Number: Book Page 178-9
Explanation and Analysis:

Sonny Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he’ll never know how close he was to a king-hell breakthrough. The Angels blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkeley line, when they acted on Barger’s hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Youth Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed itself in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the lower/working class biker/dropout types and the upper/middle, Berkeley/student activists.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker)
Page Number: Book Page 179
Explanation and Analysis:

Nobody involved in that scene, at the time, could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to persuade the Hell’s Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy of violence at Altamont merely dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker)
Page Number: Book Page 179-80
Explanation and Analysis: