In January, Merck said it had set aside $675m (£375m) simply to pay the lawyers it would need to fight claims from at least 1,400 patient groups. The day Merck said it would stop selling the arthritis drug, its value fell by a quarter, with $26bn (£14.5bn) knocked off its shares.Although Vioxx accounted for just 10 per cent of Merck's sales, shareholders realised the company faced huge legal bills. And analysts also said Merck was being damaged by a reluctance to sign partnerships with the small biotechnology firms developing many of the world's most promising new medicines.The man blamed for these strategies, Richard Gilmartin, resigned as chairman and chief executive of Merck in May. But critics of the company were disappointed when Merck announced it would appoint an insider, Richard Clark, president of its manufacturing division, as Mr Gilmartin's successor.But last October, quiet concerns about the company's progress were transformed into a full-blown panic. After a series of mega-mergers in the global pharmaceuticals sector, it had fallen back to number three in the industry, behind US rival Pfizer and the UK's GlaxoSmithKline. The company was heavily criticised for its refusal to countenance major acquisitions.

And all across the valley, the 153ft tower pulsated and flashed while the searchlights continued to shine the clenched fist into the sky.One last act of defiance for all to see.. Merck was once the world's largest drugs manufacturer, a proud company that had a reputation for ethical practices, including high-profile drug donation programmes in some of the poorest countries in Africa. Yet even before the catastrophic Vioxx scandal broke last year, the company's crown had begun to slip. A kimono-clad Japanese band brought their drumming to a pitch and the fireworks blasted off from the tower, leaving the writer's ashes to float slowly down on to his farm, and presumably on to his guests, enjoying their champagne and mint juleps.As his invited guests got into taxis, his uninvited fans started the walk back down the hill, back towards the Woody Creek Tavern for one last wake. Locals had been warned in advance by police that parking would not be allowed on the road leading to Thompson's farm and that "skittish horses and puppies" should be put in the barn so they were not scared by the 34 fireworks that would blast his ashes into the night or the searchlights that would shine Thompson's gonzo "fist" logo into the sky.And when the moment came to finally fulfil Thompson's wishes, things went without a hitch. It was what he predicted." Murray said one of the lessons of Fear and Loathing was that however chaotic and crazy one might anticipate a huge event being, things normally worked out.Murray said he believed Thompson had chosen to live in this peaceful part of Colorado, close to the Roaring Fork River, to find a refuge and achieve in some balance in his life "Your life cannot be the same as your work," he said. Most of Thompson's neighbours in what is now a rich and wealthy neighbourhood, appeared to tolerate his eccentricities.

At the Woody Creek Tavern, where Thompson was once a regular, his drinking buddies remembered him as a generous friend.But Judy Sunski, who drives a school bus in Aspen and was this weekend visiting a friend's farm in Woody Creek, said she had little time for Thompson or his celebration of drink and drug binges. Neither was she impressed by the circumstances of his suicide, shooting himself as he sat at his typewriter only moments after hanging up the phone to his wife."I don't agree in glorifying all that," she said, adding that she considered Thompson something of a trouble-maker and that on half dozen or so occasions she had seen in the local tavern that he was causing bother "I don't know, I only saw him five or six times. Maybe he only caused trouble on those five or six times."But trouble or no trouble, nothing was going to get in the way of Thompson's Hollywood-backed "cannonisation", organised by his son and his 32-year-old wife, Anita. "I think he would have liked it," he said.Murray, who played Thompson in the 1980 film Where the Buffalo Roam almost 20 years before Depp repeated the part in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, said: "This was like his life It's gonzo He wrote about this and it's happening. "I'm not going to speculate."But Thompson's long-time collaborator, Ralph Steadman, the illustrator who first worked with him for a 1970 piece about the Kentucky Derby - the piece, incidentally in which Thompson famously joked about the Black Panthers planning a riot - said he believed his friend would have approved of the send-off.Over an afternoon beer at the Hotel Jerome in Aspen with The Independent and the actor Bill Murray several hours before the memorial blast-off, Steadman said his friend, who once affectionately referred to him in print as a "scum-sucking foreign geek" might have looked on with a "smirk or a grin". ("Holy Jesus! Did they really just fire my ass out of a cannon? Damn you Johnny Depp, I was just bullshittin' about the explosives. I really wanted an urn.")Thompson's son, Juan, asked how his father might himself have covered such an event when he was a young reporter in his prime, declined a proper answer "That's hard to say," he said.