It all started, in a way, with Hunter S. Thompson. In “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (1971), his gonzo-psychedelic classic, Thompson described ingesting a rare and illicit drug called adrenochrome. You could obtain it only from the adrenaline glands of a living human body.
“That stuff makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer,” Thompson’s lawyer tells him. “You’ll go completely crazy if you take too much.” The lawyer had gotten it — the freaky details matter — from a hobby Satanist and possible child molester.
The scene is brilliant. On adrenochrome, Thompson feels he’s “wired into a 220-volt socket.” And, like so many scenes in H.S.T.’s anarchic corpus, it’s fiction. Adrenochrome does exist (it’s a byproduct of adrenaline), but it’s not a recreational drug, you don’t harvest it from living people, it has no current medical use and its effects are said to be negligible. It’s more sarsaparilla than smack.
