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How decadent author Hunter S. Thompson required a shocking quantity of cocaine, Chiva

poledriver

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Enough to give anyone Fear and Loathing: How decadent author Hunter S. Thompson required a shocking quantity of cocaine, Chivas Regal, Dunhill cigarettes and marijuana before starting to write each day

Thompson's daily routine consisted of marathon sessions of cigarette smoking, Chivas drinking, cocaine snorting and marijuana smoking
The 'outlaw' journalist didn't start writing until midnight and started taking drugs in the mid-afternoon
Miraculously, he didn't die until he took his own life at age 68

Hunter S. Thompson was portrayed as a gun-loving, drug-inhaling outlaw journalist by Johnny Depp in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' - but nothing compares to the reality of Thompson's daily intake.
Listed in E. Jean Carroll in the first chapter of her 1994 book Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson is the to-do list of cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs that Thompson consumed before gearing himself up to write at midnight, reports The Independent.

Hunter, who committed suicide at age 68, wouldn't awaken until 3pm, and then he would start his day Chivas Regal and a Dunhill cigarette.
From there it would descend into a blur of Chivas, Dunhills, coffee and cocaine.

2FF561B900000578-3391979-image-a-103_1452373667796.jpg


By 6pm, still having not eaten any food, the 'Gonzo' journalist would take the edge off with some marijuana.
At 7pm, he'd have his lunch - hamburgers, fries, tomatoes, taco salad, and coleslaw - but not without two Margaritas and two Heinekens.
Dessert would be a snow cone - over which he would pour three or four jiggers of Chivas.

By the time most of us would be headed to bed - or passed out cold - Thompson was just getting started.
At 10pm, he'd drop some acid. That was followed by a triple whammy of Chartreuse, cocaine, and marijuana.

By 11:30pm, he was ready for some more white powder.
Finally, at midnight, after a cornucopia of substances that would send most of us to the emergency room, if not the funeral home, Thompson would be ready to write.

2FF561E200000578-3391979-image-a-87_1452372265033.jpg


Throughout the night, he would write while consuming more cocaine, Chartreuse, pot, Chivas, coffee, cigarettes, and gin. But it wasn't all unhealthy - he'd throw in a glass of orange juice.
By 6am, he was ready for a soak in the hot tub, which he would top off with champagne, Dove Bars, and Fettucine Alfredo.

At 8am, he'd pop some Halcion, a prescription drug for insomia - one that comes with a warning not to consume with alcohol or other drugs.
Amazingly, he would fall asleep within 20 minutes.
Even more amazingly, he would continue to wake up each morning - until February 20, 2005, when he took his own life with a gun.

Cont -

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-astonishing-substances-consumed-writing.html
 
I would die so fast from living such a lifestyle.
Maybe I could last a week or so. But regularly? No thanks.
 
Sounds pretty crazy indeed. Wonder if it's all exaggerated a tad bit. Couldn't imagine living like that all the time either.
 
Some people do. Look at Lemmy. A bottle or two of JD and a heap of speed every day for 40 years..
 
"drops acid" two hours later, "ready to write" hahahahaha

Seems about right though. He supposedly beat John Belushi in a match of "how many narcotics can you consume in one session". That's dedication.
 
Hunter always played it up for people writing stories on him such as this reporter. I don't doubt he did many drugs but I do doubt that he was an addict.
 
He had good appetite. Never hear of bean fritters. Sounds like the western version of falafel.
 
My take is that he was certainly an addict. That booze consumption is very significant. Only someone with a substantial tollerance can handle that. Pretty much only a booze dependent person throws down scotch five minutes after waking up.

What makes you think he was not an addict?
 
No doubt he was an addict but he was also a showman. I'm sure this is exaggerated. It's just not humanly possible.
 
My take is that he was certainly an addict. That booze consumption is very significant. Only someone with a substantial tollerance can handle that. Pretty much only a booze dependent person throws down scotch five minutes after waking up.

What makes you think he was not an addict?
Just an impression I got from his writing. I could be wrong. Only him and his closest friends family really know.
 
My wild, drug-addled days working for Hunter S. Thompson
By Larry Getlen July 25, 2015

In the new novel “Gonzo Girl,” out Tuesday, the lead character is a 22-year-old aspiring novelist who shoots a .22-caliber gun at targets with the faces of Ronald Reagan and Marilyn Monroe while tripping on LSD, all with a famous author named Walker Reade — whom she met just days earlier.

The roman à clef is based on the five months author Cheryl Della Pietra spent in 1992 as the assistant to wild-man journalist Hunter S. Thompson. (She estimates the book is about 60 percent true.) Her job was to ensure, by any means necessary, that Thompson got at least one page of writing done everyday, usually after 2 a.m.

Those means included doing tons of drugs with him whenever he wanted — which was always.

One time, the pair were pulled over by police while tripping on mushrooms that had been baked in a chocolate cake. As Thompson had an obsession with weapons, there were firearms in the car.

“The police pulled us over, and I was like, oh my god, I’m about to get arrested,” says Della Pietra, now a freelance copy editor for US Weekly. (They didn’t get arrested.)

“It was very movielike — terrifying and thrilling. I’m with this icon, and there was a .44 Magnum in the back of the car under a blanket. After the cops leave, he sets up this exploding target on a tree, and I’m shooting a .44 Magnum with Hunter S. Thompson while I’m ’shrooming.”

Della Pietra heard about the assistant position through a friend who worked at Rolling Stone, the magazine for which Thompson regularly wrote. After writing Thompson a letter, she received a phone call from the “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” icon at 3 a.m. He told her: “Get on a plane tomorrow and we’ll see how things go.”

At Thompson’s Woody Creek, Colo., ranch, Della Pietra was subjected to a three-day “trial period,” which was Thompson’s test to see if she could keep up with his ravenous appetite for intoxicants. The incident with the police occurred during this time. She passed the test, though the real trials were yet to come.

There’s a scene in the book where Walker hurls a plate at the narrator’s head like a frisbee. This was based on a real incident.

“He could turn on a dime,” she says. “It’s raging, classic addict [behavior].”

Given her lack of any drug-taking background, Della Pietra was apprehensive about diving so deep, but tried to stay open to the new experience. Life with Thompson was never boring, and his antics were often thrilling.

He would host A-list celebrities (Della Pietra won’t say who) at his drugged-out bashes, drive to Don Henley’s house to prank him with fireworks and always ordered an insane amount of food at restaurants, starting with 10 or so steaks and piling on from there.

“It was always an adventure. You feel like you’re in one of his books all the time,” she says, chalking up the massive overordering to his need to keep up his gonzo image.

“It sounds insane, but for all the crazy things he did, he didn’t strike me as a reckless person. He wasn’t gonna shoot me.”

As for the partying A-listers, in the novel Della Pietra created a famous actor named Larry Lucas that the narrator sleeps with. The character is a composite, she says, and while she won’t reveal the inspirations, she says Alley’s relationship with him is based on some truth.

Another aspect of the novel she says is based on truth is the-character’s deteriorating writing skills. Whether due to age, drugs or both, Della Pietra says that Thompson’s chops then were clearly not what they had been during his “Fear & Loathing” heyday.

“The book that eventually came out was ‘Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie,’ about the [Bill] Clinton campaign, and I think it can be reasonably argued it’s one of his weaker works,” she says.

Della Pietra also questions what role drugs ultimately played in his downfall.

“We look at people like Amy Winehouse or Philip Seymour Hoffman, people who have their genius tied to their substance abuse, and we have some sympathy for them. We feel perhaps they’re controlled by these substances,” she says.

“[Hunter] had this image of being so crazy and drug-addled that we gave him a pass. [But] were the sensitivities he had as an artist too much for him? [Substance abuse is seen] as part of who he was, and that it was funny, crazy, and interesting. I have a hard time believing there wasn’t something else there.”

continued here http://nypost.com/2015/07/25/my-wild-days-working-for-hunter-s-thompson/

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First person singular: Hunter S Thompson
By Neil McCormick 26 Feb 2005

The late Hunter S Thompson was a writer who made a big impression on rock and roll. Although he was not a music critic, he came to international prominence writing for America's leading music paper, Rolling Stone. His wild, drug-fuelled adventures, incendiary prose and fearlessly expressed opinions blazed a trail that many young journalists (myself included) were inspired to follow.

But absent from the current wave of eulogies of Thompson, who committed suicide last Sunday, is the fact that his drug and alcohol abuse eventually obliterated his literary gifts. As his outstanding collection The Great Shark Hunt demonstrates, Thompson was a brilliant journalist before he liberated himself from the constraints of the profession (such as objectivity and accuracy) with his pioneering "Gonzo" style. His greatest period of creativity certainly commences with Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, written in 1972. The Great Shark Hunt, published in 1979, contains his last work of any merit.

The 11 books Thompson published in the next 25 years were a patchwork of half-finished columns and poorly researched articles, the occasional flashes of brilliant prose serving only to illuminate his lack of coherent thought and the ever-dimming light of his genius. As he retreated from the front line of journalism, he became a freak show on the corner of American pop culture.

The books kept getting smaller. The print kept getting bigger. I was a huge fan but I had to stop reading when it came to Songs of the Doomed in 1990, his third collection of Gonzo Papers, which brought together all the ill-conceived pieces passed over in previous collections, including several chapters of The Rum Diaries, a novel written and rejected by publishers almost 30 years before. But it got worse. There was a fourth volume of Gonzo Papers and, in 1998, Thompson released his dreadful early novel in its entirety

By then, I had long since started to question the pop-cultural mythologisation of hard drug abuse. I had seen close friends surrender all their gifts to addiction and come through a bruising battle with my own demons. Does the road of excess
really lead to the palace of wisdom, or does it lead to a swollen liver, eroded mental function and suicidal desperation?

We see the same story acted out in rock and roll year after year. Singer Pete Doherty is the latest victim, squandering his talents for a fix. Yet rock culture is so deeply attached to the notion that drugs and hedonism are the fount of creativity that to even question it makes one seem ridiculously square. In sport, drug-taking is a disgrace. In rock, "clean living" is an insult.

In music, as in art and literature, a lot of great work has been created by those who have had the recklessness, curiosity, bravery or desperation to pursue the muse with no holds barred. Among those who burned briefly and brightly are Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, their reputations never having to endure an old age of diminishing prowess. A few unrepentant survivors of a lifetime's self-abuse shuffle on, like Shane MacGowan and Shaun Ryder, pale shadows of their former creative selves; or synaptic burn-outs like Ozzy Osbourne and, dare I say it, Keith Richards, the ex-junkie king of cool, cruising on past reputations and hell-raising anecdotes.

There are certainly those who dabbled with destructive forces and emerged creatively intact, perhaps stronger for it: John Lennon, David Bowie, Lou Reed and Johnny Cash. In every case they had the wisdom, fortitude or sheer good luck to stop before real damage was done. More pertinently, they were demonstrably talented before drugs entered the frame and (as their post-addiction output proved) did not rely on narcotics to inspire them.

cont http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3637824/First-person-singular-Hunter-S-Thompson.html

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Hunter S. Thompson - Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride (Documentary)
 
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