"Kill the Body, and Head wil Die"

I enjoyed reading, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S Thompson.  I have read parts of it before and was not thrilled by it.  The background on the literary style helped me to appreciate it this time.  Thompson's candid style of recording all of his experiences was refreshing.  It felt like he wrote without an audience in mind.  But from his own passion about the loss of the American dream. His drug use in the story is over the top which suggests to me that its not about consciousness expanding but escape.  He does not want to expand his mind but escape from the reality of world as he views it.  He says, "Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can." (Thompson 1)  He is disillusioned by the loss of the ideas of the 1960's.  The new decade seems to hold no promise for him.  He writes about the sixties in a very forlorn way, "...But that was some other era, burned out and long gone from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Seventy One.  A lot of things had changed in those years." (Thompson 12)  Thompson's view of the American dream seems to have vanished in the haze.  Was the dream gone? Why go to Las Vegas to look for the American dream when it is the city of make believe?