He was a full blown functional amphetamine addict. Some artists really are something else on drugs, can’t really take away all the stuff he made on it.
Someone else can go vet this, but found this with quick googling:
Afterward, according to Kyle Arnold’s biography, he was taking speed by the handful. “He stuffed his refrigerator with thousand-pill jars of amphetamines” and “told his mother he consumed a thousand-pill jar per week.”
There’s a fine line with all of this, and he is lucky he didn’t enter full paranoid breakdown (that we know of). Zappos CEO pretty much operated in the same way and it got his life.
PKD himself wrote a semi-autobiographical story (“A Scanner Darkly”) about mental breakdown due to drug use. It’s a haunting book and the feeling it evokes has stuck with me since I read it about ten years ago.
Second that, the movie is brilliant. The cast is brilliant, too. Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and I'm certain I'm forgetting a few more.
Someone else can go vet this, but found this with quick googling:
Afterward, according to Kyle Arnold’s biography, he was taking speed by the handful. “He stuffed his refrigerator with thousand-pill jars of amphetamines” and “told his mother he consumed a thousand-pill jar per week.”
There’s a fine line with all of this, and he is lucky he didn’t enter full paranoid breakdown (that we know of). Zappos CEO pretty much operated in the same way and it got his life.
YMMV, for real.