Two points I wanted to make immediately:
1) All I felt in Fear and Loathing was rage, rage they suppressed by using every drug they knew of, rage which they likely claimed was in response to something or other–Nixon of course being a prime candidate–but which was much deeper than that.
His attorney was almost certainly a rapist, and I wonder what stories he left out of his account. Moralizing seems not to have been something he did much of. His problems were always practical, viz how to get away with it. I counted three women they seriously abused: Lucy, Alice, and the waitress, who had a knife pulled on her. All three started with his attorney, but they all included him, and he never seemed to care.
Remind me: what do you call someone with superficial charm, an innate and prodigious capacity for self and other deception, an inordinate appetite for thrills, and a seeming lack of conscience? That’s more or less a textbook definition, isn’t it?
2) “Gonzo” journalism isn’t journalism at all.
What he craved, but which had not yet been created, was a reality show, of which he was the star. He would have enjoyed watching himself on TV. He would have worked hard to out-Ozzy Ozzy.
The deeper point, of course, is his relationship with “the Sixties”. I will get to that eventually, but will note simply in passing that just about every treatment of him calls him either a counter-cultural icon or hero.