Drugs and PKD are really inseparable. Even putting aside them being a common feature of his stories, his writing process was to lock himself in a shed for a wee

Drugs and PKD are really inseparable. Even putting aside them being a common feature of his stories, his writing process was to lock himself in a shed for a week, do a bunch of amphetamines and crank out a story. It certainly didn’t help either that his paranoia about being monitored by spy agencies and such turned out to be true. That said, Scanner is one of his later works after he stopped abusing drugs. The book is fully about what his habit did to him and many of his friends. In the preface, he eulogizes a long list of people he knew that ended up dead or permanently injured due to their habits. There is more than one reason the narcotic in the book is called Substance D — and the D is short for death. But, when contrasted with the drugs in his other works (e.g., Can-D in Three Stigmata), the drug does not offer a necessary escape from the monotony of life in a dark, ultra-capitalist future nor does it get linked to religion (either as a replacement for it or as a kind of gnostic guide to the truth). It just destroys people physically and mentally. The latter happens at a truly deep level where the ego / identity of a user rots away to nothing over time. While this happens quite literally, it’s clear that this is him bemoaning the ego death of his friends as their personalities were just replaced by the drugs. The characters in Scanner all seem like real tweakers PKD knew throughout his life and they come across the most vibrant on the page compared to those in the other works of his I read. This novel isn’t just a desperate (albeit often brilliant) attempt at getting money for Dick’s next high. It is him reflecting on the life choices he and people he knew made over the years and bemoaning what their drug habits took from them.