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

"Here I am infiltrating a goddamn Pig confer ence, but sure as hell there's some dope-dealing bomb freak in this town who's going to recognize me and put the word out that I'm out here partying with a thousand cops!'

We all wore name tags. They came with the $100 "registra tion fee." Mine said I was a "private investigator" from L.A. - which was true, in a sense; and my attorney's name-tag identified him as an expert in "Criminal Drug Analysis." Which was also true, in a sense.

But nobody seemed to care who was what, or why. Security was too loose for that kind of gritty paranoia. But we were also a bit tense because we'd given the registrar a bad check for our dual registration fee. It was a check from one of my attorney's pimp/drug underworld clients that he assumed, from long experience, was absolutely worthless.



7. If You Don’t Know, Come To Learn… If You Know, Come To Teach

The first session - the opening remarks - lasted most of the afternoon. We sat patiently through the first two hours, al though 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.

I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid… for some of the people; there were faces and bodies in that group who would have been absolutely unendurable on acid. The sight of a 344-pound police chief from Waco, Texas, necking openly with his 290-pound wife (or whatever woman he had with him) when the lights were turned off for a Dope Film was just barely tolerable on mescaline-which is mainly sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it - but with head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about of the “dangers of marijuana" would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it:

The medulla would attempt to close itself off from the signals it was getting from the frontal lobes… and the middle-brain, meanwhile, would be trying desperately to put a different interpretation on the scene, before passing it back to the medulla and the risk of physical action.

Acid is a relatively complex drug, in its effects, while mesca line is pretty simple and straightforward - but in a scene like this, the difference was academic.