I think your problem is more with the way drug users tend to create caricatures of themselves based on the 5 or 6 original characters that actually have existed at one time or another. It pisses me off too, when I see people exploring Hunter S. Thompson, Andy Warhol, and William S. Burroughs from the angle of, "that person did drugs, so do I, therefore I totally understand what is going on and don't deserve to die in a fire."
If you look back in time, and really listen to what people like Aleister Crowley and Marquis de Sade were about, you might forgive yourself for skipping over their sexual habits and choice of intoxication because the hype has died down considerably and come to the conclusion that these people may have been the only normal people alive at the time, or at least the only people worth hanging out with. The same can be said for Hunter S. Thompson. But because he is so totally misunderstood by a culture that views certain lifestyle choices as fashion statements designed to be hollowed out and mass-produced, we have kids walking around making Hunter faces while wearing sun glasses as some sort of attempt to convince others that they belong in the same brand of counter-culture as Hunter.
What these people fail to realize is that Hunter was never a part of any movement. He was a movement himself, and everyone else can be too if they would take Hunter's scaly, dead penis out of their mouths for a minute and actually pay attention to what the drugs are telling them.