Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas   ::   Thompson Hunter S.

… Why botherwith newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wine to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.



14. Farewell to Vegas… “God’s Mercy on You Swine!”

I skulked around the airport, I realized that I was still wearing my police,identification badge. It was a flat orange rectangle, sealed in clear plastic, that said: "Raoul Duke, Spe cial Investigator, Los Angeles." I saw it in the mirror above urinal.

Get rid of this thing, I thought. Tear it off. The gig is finished… and it proved nothing. At least not to me. And certainly not to my attorney-who also had a badge-but he was back in Malibu, nursing his paranoid sores.

It been a waste of time, a lame fuckaround that was only - in clear retrospect - a cheap excuse for a thousand cops to spend a few days in Las Vegas and lay the bill on the taxpayers. Nobody had learned anything- or at least nothing except new. Except maybe me… and all I learned was that the District Attorneys' Association is about ten years behind the grim truth and harsh kinetic realities of what they just recently learned to call "the Drug Culture" in tyhe Year of Our lord, 1971.

They are still burning the taxpayers for thousands of dollars to make films about "the dangers of LSD," at a time when acid is widely known - to everybody but cops-to be the Studenbaker of the drug market, the popularity of psychedelics has fallen off so drastically drastically that most voluime dealers no longer even handle qualioty acid or mescaline except as a favor to special customers: Mainly jaded, over thirty drug dilettantes - likeme, and my attorney.

The big market, these days, is in Downers. Reds and smack -Seconal and heroin-and a hellbroth of bad domestic grass sprayed with everything from arsenic to horse tranquillizers. What sells, today, is whateverFucks You Up-whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. The ghetto market has mushroomed into subur bia. The Miltown man 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 went straight to the needle off Seconal. They never even bothered to try speed.

Uppers are no longer stylish. Methedrine is almost as rare, on the 1971 market, as pure acid or DMT.