Amazingly, it turns out an amusing anecdote I tell is true (or at least told in a more reputable forum). From Paul Hoffman's biography on Paul Erdos: "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth":

Like all of Erdos's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdos $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdos accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdos said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.

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