I suspect he was no stranger to the hard stuff measured in grams. Besides an SF author he was a movie critic and he reviewed the 2000 movie “Almost Famous” (about a kid journalist following a 1970s rock band on tour) negatively. While I and most others liked the movie, he may have had a point – the movie shows the band being wild by drinking and smoking pot and Shepard complained that that was unrealistic because the 1970s rock scene was way wilder than that.
