A Scanner Darkly/YMMV

• Anvilicious: it does go pretty far in service of Drugs Are Bad.
  • For those who can see it, there is also An Aesop about the futility of the Drug War.
    • It is also an Author Tract, since he dedicates it to Janis and other creative people lost to drugs.
      • It's worth mentioning that one of the people listed is himself (as "Phil"). He suffered pancreatic failure due to his drug use.
  • It also goes pretty far to point out the hypocrisy of rehab clinics and the system itself, also playing heavily on the idea that people who have been broken or tormented by drugs or mental illness are not only discarded but invalidated by their view on reality... in essence, no one would ever believe that the rehab clinic is in fact using drug burnouts to farm the drug itself. Philip Dick likes his irony.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The story takes place after the U.S. lost the War On Drugs. As of June 2011, the Global Commission of Drug Policy has declared the war a failure. Uh-oh...
• Moral Dissonance: In the bicycle scene mentioned above, it's pointed out by one of the psychiatrists that it took "a negro" to point out to the others how speeds on a bicycle work. Perhaps when the book was written, this kind of comment could have been made without even considering the Unfortunate Implications, or perhaps not. Either way, the line was excluded from the movie.
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped