Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics
Director and writer: Donick Cary
Nick Offerman, Sting, ASAP Rocky, Bill Kreutzmann, Rosie Perez, Reggie Watts,
Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennonm, Brett Gelman, Will Forte, David Cross, Carrie Fisher, Natasha Lyonne, Anthony Bourdain, Donovan, Lewis Black, Sarah Silverman, Ben Stiller and more.
This Netflix documentary, earnest but leavened with humor, takes a look at the social and personal impacts of hallucinogens, mostly covering the era from the early 60s until now, when the recognition of such drugs first became widespread in American culture.
It’s worth noting that while some of the star-studded cast are now dead, none of them died from taking acid and throwing themselves out a window. The outtakes from all the “Just Say No” type PSAs of the time left me wondering if defenestration was the second most-popular sport in America, just behind toad licking. But that was back in the sixties, when doors hadn’t been invented yet, and windows were much easier to crash through than walls. At least, that’s my working theory. It may need some refinement.
The documentary comes at a time when western medicine is just starting to seriously explore the possible value of such drugs, especially in regards to the treatment of such intractable medical problems such as schizophrenia or severe chronic depression. The more we learn, the more we realize that Timothy Leary, if overly enthusiastic, was right; LSD and similar drugs can greatly help with various psychological and medical problems.
The celebrity stories are generally hilarious; Sting in a bucolic hellscape of gently puzzled cows, or Princess Leia, stoned off her tits and ready to bang Jabba the Hutt. Narrated with a Karl Malden gravitas by Axe Cop himself, Nick Offerman.
The stories, as they move past the goofy trivia of carpet decorations crawling around and laughing at your hand, show a pattern of dislodged preconceptions and mental habits, shifts that permit insights—often profound and permanent—to take place.
I’ve long maintained that you discover nothing on an acid trip that wasn’t already there somewhere within your own psyche. But as the show notes, we know damned little of what’s in our heads, with even memory being an extremely unreliable narrator of perhaps 1/10th of one percent of our experiences, from which depends what we call our personae, or personalities. Several of the people advise against looking in a mirror while tripping, and while it’s not something I’ve ever tried, I can readily see how that could lead to trouble.
Bad trips, the leading cause of defenestration, are discussed. For the most part, they are feelings of claustrophobia and paranoia, best dealt with by clinging to the fact that the trip will come to an end, and things will get back to close to normal. I used to refer to that discipline of thought as “riding the eye of the hurricane.” Maintain a calm center, and wait. It will pass, and there’s nothing there that will really hurt you unless you allow it to hurt you. And forget the window; there’s a perfectly good door right over there.
The show does emphasize that when taking hallucinogens, one should do so in a place where one normally feels safe and secure, and drop with people one likes and trusts, and be in a good frame of reference when taking the drugs. And avoid the classic error, ninety minutes in, of saying “This shit isn’t doing anything. We got burned. Give me another tab and let’s see if that helps.”
Good Trip is an amusing but informative and engrossing look into psychedelics and how they affect us, as individuals and as a society.
Now on Netflix.