'We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold... when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, `I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive ...`' Hunter S. Thompson is roaring down the desert highway to Las Vegas with his attorney, the Samoan, to find the dark side of the American Dream. Armed with a drug arsenal of stupendous proportions, the duo engage in a surreal succession of chemically enhanced confrontations with casino operators, police officers and assorted Middle Americans. This stylish reissue of Hunter S. Thompson's iconic masterpiece, a controversial bestseller when it appeared in 1971, features the brilliant Ralph Steadman illustrations of the original. It brings to a new generation the hallucinatory humor and nightmare terror of Hunter S. Thompson's musings on the collapse of the American Dream.