Erdös and amphetamines: check

Some weeks ago I wrote a review on Jonah Lehrer's book "Imagine," in which I complained about missing references. Now that it turns out Lehrer fabricated quotes and facts on various occasions (see eg here and here), I recalled that I meant to look up a reference on an interesting story he told, that the famous mathematician Paul Erdös kept up his productivity by taking benzedrine. Benzedrine belongs to the amphetamines, also known as speed. Lehrer did not quote any source for this story.

So I did look it up, and it turns out it's true. In Paul Hoffman's biography of Erdös one finds:

Erdös first did mathematics at the age of three, but for the last twenty-five years of his life, since the death of this mother, he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso, and caffeine tablets. "A mathematician," Erdös was fond of saying, "is a machine for tuning coffee into theorems." When friends urged him to slow down, he always had the same response: "There'll be plenty of time to rest in the grave."

(You can read chapter 1 from the book, which contains this paragraph, here).
Benzedrine was available on prescription in the USA during this time. Erdös lived to the age of 83. During his lifetime, he wrote or co-authored 1,475 academic papers.

Lehrer also relates the following story in his book

Ron Graham, a friend and fellow mathematician, once bet Erdos five hundred dollars that he couldn't abstain from amphetamines for thirty days. Erdos won the wager but complained that the progress of mathematicians had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper, my mind was filled with ideas," he complained. "Now all I see is a blank piece of paper.

(Omitted umlauts are Lehrer's, not mine.) Lehrer does not mention Erdös was originally prescribed benzedrine to treat depression after his mother's death. I'm not sure exactly what the origin of this story is. It is mentioned in a slightly different wording in this PDF by Joshua Hill:

Erdős's friends worried about his drug use, and in 1979 Graham bet Erdős $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdős accepted, and went cold turkey for a complete month. Erdős's comment at the end of the month was "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 then immediately started taking amphetamines again.

Hill's article is not quoted by Lehrer, and there's no reference in Hill's article. It also seems to go back to Paul Hoffman's book (same chapter).

(Note added: I revised the above paragraph, because I hadn't originally seen it in Hoffman's book.)

Partly related: Calculate your Erdős number here, mine is 4.