Barely Tolerable on Mescaline
Hi. I’m sleepy and going to bed early tonight. It’s been a long week already. But I had an urge first to leave you with some HST Vegas Wisdom from The DA’s convention.
The motto on the invitations for the National DA’s Convention in Las Vegas, April 25-29, 1971 was
If You Don’t Know, Come to Learn… If You Know, Come to Teach.
The conference was designed to teach the professional law enforcement community the nature and details of street drugs. Hunter and Oscar sat through the first two hours, immediately knowing they were not going to learn Anything, and equally clear that they’d be crazy to try and Teach anything to the DAs and called the whole thing irrelevant gibberish.
…These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni.–Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas.
I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid…except 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 a sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it — but with a 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 the "dangers of Marijuana" would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it….
MAybe that’s not the happiest image to go to bed with, oh well, I’m sleepy enough tonight that it might even bring me comfort.
Until next time, your friend, who came to learn,
Anita Thompson
