Gonzo and Marijuana
First things first: What is Gonzo? The hearing of the name are many people of a purple Muppet “What do” or even a Japanese anime studio. However, Gonzo is a term usually applied journalism (although it should be used with other forms of creative output and situations). It is a kind of journalism that the writer is in the story, first waiving the usual journalistic distance in favor of the frontal, sometimes fictional, subjective descriptions of history and in person. In other words, if I start writing and talking about the way I was sitting, the lucky jar of marijuana seeds on my desk and their relationship, what I write that gonzo journalism was. Although I was not all marijuana seeds on my desk, you may find that many people who do commit this kind of writing. Started in the sixties and seventies, was gonzo journalism centering on the characters on a particular idea, message or predominant theme of the times. Almost uniquely American made, the questions were the personal from the time: war, government, civil rights, cannabis and harder drugs and freedoms. This often meant participation in some or all of these questions, and it is difficult from a gonzo journalist, was not involved in most, if not all of them think. Consumption of cannabis and harder drugs was much more obviously common and it can be argued that this in turn fueled the gonzo style itself. Hunter S. ThompsonWhile a number of journalists embraced Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson is, was the king of the genre. Thompson’s colorful life included for sheriff in Aspen on the Freak Power “ticket, and writes about riding with Hell’s Angels, and documenting the 1972 election campaign in his own inimitable way. Arguably his most famous work, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of The American Dream”, often shortened only Fear and Loathing. The text to write a fictional version of Thompson and his lawyer travel to Las Vegas, an article on the Mint 400 race. Marijuana is just one of many drugs on the way in a text that excess, the American life and the American Dream examines consumed. Thompson did not stint on drugs. Famous for his use of something (the use of a light bulb as a bong to chomping on raw marijuana seeds), to try anything, the connection between Gonzo and Marijuana pretty obvious at this time. Fear and Loathing is a bible for writers in the same style, and as you can imagine the genre that attracts the people who already have an affinity to iconoclasm, drug use and living outside of the usual views of society. If the patron defended the style of marijuana and the drug is central to some of Gonzo’s ideas, it is clear that the drug had at least some effect on the genre as a whole. The most important question is not “Is there a link” more “how much has affected others?” The problem is with a mixture of such artistic, fictional, pharmaceutical and journalistic forces, we may also ask: “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”
