“I was eating tons and tons of painkillers. It was as hard to kick as heroin. It was really, really bad”: How High On Fire’s Matt Pike pulled back from the edge of darkness to make De Vermis Mysteriis

High On Fire posing for a photograph in 2012.

High On Fire mainman Matt Pike is one of metal’s leading weed enthusiasts. But in 2012, as the stoner-doom linchpins prepared to release their sixth album, De Vermis Mysteriis, he revealed that he’d just come through dealing with darker drugs