Based on a True Story?
I think this movie is based on what is either a true story or an urban legend.
When I was attending the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, there was a story about a book written by one of the students called "God Wants You Dead" that was full of cool ideas about life and the nature of reality. The rummer was that you could actually get stoned just by reading it, and that the federal government was trying to suppress it and/or make it illegal. While I never saw a copy of the book, I heard it mentioned by a few different people who claimed to have read it or knew someone that had.