Celebs share the ins and outs of tripping balls in Netflix's Have A Good Trip trailer
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Netflix’s next original documentary is enough to make any braggadocios D.A.R.E. graduate clutch their pamphlet in shock. Have A Good Trip: Adventures In Psychedelics takes a surreal look into the world of ingesting acid, ‘shrooms, and the like. Here’s Netflix’s official synopsis:
“Have A Good Trip: Adventures In Psychedelics is a documentary featuring real-life tripping stories from A-list actors, comedians, and musicians. Star-studded reenactments and surreal animations bring their comedic hallucinations to life. The film explores the pros, cons, history, future, science, pop cultural impact, and cosmic possibilities of hallucinogens. The film also acts as an unofficial user’s guide for these consciousness altering compounds, and helps dispel the scare myths of the After School Special era. The film tackles some big questions: Can psychedelics have a role in treating mental health? Do they make us jump out of windows? Is love really all we need? Can trees talk?”
The documentary—written and directed by the Emmy award-winning Donick Cary—was slated to premiere at SXSW in March, but later found a home at Netflix after the festival’s cancellation. In the below trailer, you can see the accounts from Nick Kroll, Sarah Silverman, Rosie Perez, fuckin’ Sting, and a preponderance of famous faces come to life with the help of some super accurate reenactments and some sweet animation. If that’s not enough, you can also hear A$AP Rocky’s audible impression of rainbows shooting “out of [his] dick,” which really sells the whole film.
Have A Good Trip beginning streaming on Netflix May 11.
18 Comments
I’ve heard a lot of tripping stories, the only good one is told by Dock Ellis:
I live in Pittsburgh and this story is a fucking legend
As told by Todd Snider:
Highly recommend. Some of the most fun experiences of my life. Haven’t done any in years, but shrooms are just always the best. Smiling from ear to ear, getting cool visuals and everything feeling hilarious and profound at the same time.
I have never done psychedelics. Of all the bullshit that stuck with me from DARE, I think the worry of a bad trip is still there in me. Plus with Pot legal in my state and my Adderall hook up just me bumming off my wife who has a script, I don’t even know a drug dealer anymore who could hook me up if I wanted to try.
A good trip is unsettling enough. A bad trip would be like a 14-hour nightmare you can’t wake up from.I’d still probably trade these first 122 days of 2020 for it, though.
It’s worth trying at least once. You can always relax in the bummer tent if it goes wrong.
I feel like they don’t work correctly for me. I’ve tried a bit when I was younger, but there’s always half of me that’s fully aware the other part is all falsely weird. Even the better experiences I’ve had and enjoyed I reach a point where I want to stop feeling like that. Not even a bad trip or something, just after a few hours I go ok that was fun I’m done now, so I’d just drink some water and wait until I could fall asleep. It lasts such a long time. Plus I don’t think I’ve ever had a particularly bad nightmare experience like some people do.I think some people are better at diving into it and accepting the feeling.
I think body chemistry might have something to do with it, too. I’ve heard so many stories from so many people about how awesome weed is that when recreational cannabis was legalized in my state, I dove right in. It never quite works for me, though. I’ve had some experiences where I’m waiting and waiting for something to happen, until I finally realize that nothing is going to happen. And then sometimes I’m hit hard and I spend the entire time wanting it to stop. There is no happy medium for me with cannabis.My two psychedelic experiences (on ‘shrooms) have been a little different. The first time, I had a real experience (dancing flowers, visions of hexagonal snakes, the whole deal) and really enjoyed it – especially the aftermath when I was filled to overflowing with love for everything and everyone exactly the way it/they are, without needing or wanting anything in return. It was literally a state of bliss. The second time, a couple weeks later on twice the dosage as the first time around, I had less than one-tenth the experience (even though the mushrooms source was the same). Very confusing on a pharmaceutical level.
You may already know all this, so forgive me if I’m, er, drugsplaining (?). Cannabis can have wildly varying effects for different people depending on the delivery mechanism, and of course different mechanisms (e.g. smoking, sublinguals, edibles) generally have a different pattern of effects. We’ve found that edibles work the best for us: the dosage is very precise, they give us time to prep, the effects come on slowly and last for a few hours. Lately we’ve been buying gummies that contain 10 mg THC each (usually from a sativa strain, though we did go through one bag of sativa/indica hybrid), and one of those usually takes about 45-60 minutes to start feeling noticeable (depends on how much we’ve eaten recently). By about two hours time slows down and everything is funny. That lasts for a couple more hours by which time we’ve usually gone to bed.Back when recreational cannabis use became legal in California (though when it was still illegal to sell it) we had a pipe we used for smoking occasionally, but even though the onset with smoking is typically much faster, we both agreed that inhaling any kind of burning fumes was a bad idea. With edibles, we make an evening of it once every couple of weeks.
Oh, I know. It’s frustrating to me, though, that the degree of difficulty can be so high for cannabis. What with different strains/hybrids, delivery mechanisms, outright bogus claims, and variety of products from companies that didn’t exist ten minutes ago, you as a consumer basically have only a vague idea of what you’re getting when you purchase a product. When I drink a glass of wine or beer, I know exactly what to expect. With cannabis it’s more along the lines of: “Who knows?! I guess we’ll see.” After two or three years of persistent experimentation, one of which involved me passing out on a street corner and then fighting off paranoia during the Uber ride home, I’ve gone back to good, old alcohol.
I achieved such a high level of consciousness while shrooming that I realized shrooming and most other drug use is stupid.I still get knee-walking drunk, though.
Last year I read How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma). It was a fascinating read, going into the history of psychedelics, research (legal and otherwise), and how people are now starting to figure out that rather than trying to scare everyone away from using them, we should maybe do actual scientific research into what they do and how they might benefit us. I’ve never used any psychedelics (nothing stronger than cannabis; since it became legal in California I use it once every couple of weekends) but it’s made me interested in looking into trying it in a safe environment.
This documentary is missing a bet if it didn’t include Roger Corman, who dropped acid so he could make The Trip. He went up to Big Sur with some friends, dropped a tab, and spent the next eight hours humping the earth, imagining giant crystal ships in the sky (à la Lizard King), and conceiving of free, effortless methods of film distribution.
I was getting pretty close to trying acid back in college. My friends did it a few times a year… I was hesitant but slowly getting sold. But then they did a batch one night that was allegedly 10 or 20 times stronger than a normal dosage (Who knows, It’s not like we had it tested).The whole thing was a 10 hour nightmare, and I was one of the babysitters. One of the guys got violent and tried to hit my friend over the head with a bottle (we had to restrain him). Another one was in a fetal position just staring at a white wall because he was scared to look at anything “more complex” than that. Another one was freaking out, calmed down, went home and sat on his porch and thought he was fine until “skull armies” emerged from the trees and started attacking him.Nobody had a good trip that night.That experience totally turned me off to the idea. The two scariest things (aside from the skull armies) were the length and lack of control. Conceptually, I know that most psychedelics aren’t likely physically harmful. You can’t die from overdosing on acid (I just read an article about a woman who accidentally took 550 times the normal dose by pulling a Mia Wallace, snorting a line of “coke” that was actually powdered LSD. Bad trip, but it may have cured her lyme disease and now she’s a pretty interesting case study). But I’m 45 years old now. I think that ship has sailed and I’m not really sad I never hopped on board.
I’ve done a good bit of the more common psychedelics, acid and shrooms mostly. They never really made me trip the way people describe it in movies and such. I got tracers, brighter colors, odd thought patterns and the body high that usually accompanies those substances but nothing more. Then I got in touch with a lab in China that would make whatever to order and send it to the US with papers that could pass customs. I tried a number of substances they offered that were featured in renegade chemist Alexander Shulgin’s books PiHKAL and TiHKAL (Phenelethylamines and Tryptamins I Have Known And Loved). Some of those had significantly more effects than what I’d been using, some had less. But for me the king of them all was DMT. I had scales accurate to three decimal places and assumed 100% purity so I don’t think I dosed it wrong but that stuff did me different than anything else. Most hallucinogens have a waiting time before you really start to feel them, half an hour to an hour. Not this one. Body high five minutes after oral ingestion. Not even nasal or sublingual which would have been less surprising. Visuals in ten minutes. This caused me some anxiety but I managed to move past it. By half an hour in I was losing awareness of my body and surroundings as I moved in a world of fractals and light. Then I seemed to lose any selfhood as a separate being from this new world that seemed to exist behind and between the everyday reality I was accustomed to. At the peak was able to just roll with it but while I slowly came down fear started to dominate the experience, fear that I would be stuck like this. I felt like I would never be able to interact with people or the physical world in a normal way again. Thankfully this feeling diminished as the effects tapered off. DMT has a relatively short duration compared to a lot of psychedelics so 4 or five hours after the experience began I was back to baseline. I have not tried any sort of hallucinogen or psychedelic drug since. Nor have I felt myself to be quite the same person after this experience, although I’d be hard pressed to identify particular differences. Tl;dr: Hallucinogens are very powerful and should be used cautiously, in a controlled environment with sober supervision. Especially DMT. Seriously. Had I been alone or anywhere but my home God knows what could have happened.
Username checks out.
If you have access to any of Shulgin’s stuff, 2C-B’s pretty great.