Drugs and alcohol played an active part throughout Stone’s work. This reflected his own experiences with intoxicants of one sort or another. It also found expression in the idea that mind-bending drugs and distorted perception might lead to a higher truth or to abject tragedy. “It’s a mess when everybody’s high,” he writes in “A Higher Horror of the Whiteness.” “I liked it better when the weirdest thing around was me.”

There have been many failed attempts to bring On the Road to the silver screen by U.S. filmmakers. Francis Ford Coppola, who purchased the rights to the screenplay in 1979, tried several times to adapt the work into film, but his efforts never materialized. “I never knew how to do it,” he remarked when Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles accepted the cumbersome task of filming the unfilmable. It was Salles (best known for the Motorcycle Diaries, another road film) that Coppola finally trusted to make On the Road a reality, with a screenplay developed by José Rivera. 

From New America Media and Richmond Pulse: Across the San Francisco Bay Area, young people are using all kinds of drugs – well known, obscure, illegal and prescription. Although the names and effects of the drugs may vary, what’s consistent is that youth are a major segment of the population abusing them, often mixing multiple substances at the same time. And in Oakland, Richmond and other East Bay communities, it’s the prescription drugs that appear to be gaining popularity among youth.