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I'm Dr. Walt Miner.
I'm here to talk about LSD.
We have never given LSD to a living creature
that it hasn't affected.
It affects fish, it affects spiders,
it affects rabbits, and dogs, and cats.
Perhaps most interesting of all, for one reason or another,
LSD was given to an elephant once.
And, lo and behold, it killed the elephant.
Some people have a bad experience the first time they take the drug.
Others take it 30, 60, or even a hundred times,
before their bad trip.
And the bad trip?
Instant insanity.
Often a never-never land of no return.
There is nothing, um... grown-up or sophisticated
in taking an LSD trip at all.
They're just being complete fools.
It is playing Russian roulette.
Drug use in educational films has always been portrayed
in a somewhat exaggerated and hysterical way.
-Parents panicking,
children having freak-outs, and people jumping out of windows.
Don't get me wrong, drugs can be dangerous,
but they can also be hilarious.
Now, what kind of person would put themselves
through something dangerous and hilarious?
If nothing else,
my hope is that tonight's film will answer that question.
Enjoy.
I don't think psychedelics are the answer to the world's problems,
but they could be a start.
All geniuses did it.
Einstein, Steve Jobs, Jimi Hendrix, A$AP fuckin' Rocky.
And I just always had this question, "There's gotta be more..."
And then when I took acid, I went, "Oh, you were right. There's a lot more."
My point of view changed on drugs.
We gained a lot of insight about the way I view reality.
I've easily done over a hundred hits...
easily, and probably closer to two.
-Doesn't eight make you legally insane? -They say that...
I think I've done mushrooms, like, 12 times...
I probably did mushrooms... 12 times.
Literally 50 times.
I took a lot of acid.
A lot of acid.
I took a lot of acid. I must've taken around 500 trips.
I took acid once.
Maybe even didn't need to actually take it.
Probably could've just watched this documentary.
Is everybody in?
The movie is about to begin.
♪ There will be some happy endings ♪
♪ There'll be dreams That don't come true ♪
♪ But in the times ahead ♪
♪ There's love and hate And hope and dread coming ♪
♪ All in all ♪
♪ It makes it that much harder For you, yeah ♪
♪ I know you're worried ♪
♪ I'm worried too ♪
♪ But if you're ready ♪
♪ I'm here to fall with you ♪
♪ What else is there for us to do? ♪
Psychotropic drugs fall under a huge, broad category.
What I experimented with were hallucinogens.
And they put you in a state of consciousness which is very altered,
where your perception, your cognition,
your, uh... knowing is very different.
Uh... Initially, it feels like it's not real,
but then when you come out of it, you wonder what is real.
Um, I wouldn't like this to be an exercise in the sort of "just say no" campaign,
you know... ...putting people off this experience,
because I think it's a valuable experience.
And whenever I've had a bad trip,
and I've had many,
I always realize that, um... it was what I needed.
Um...
sometimes it kicks your arse,
and sometimes you need to have your ego taken down...
a notch or two.
On the other hand,
you can get immensely rewarding experiences,
full of love and support,
and a sense of buoyancy,
and a sense of... a religious sense of connection to the planet.
So my feeling is it's, um... It balances out.
I remember one day, a friend of mine gave me some dried peyote,
which I'd... I'd never taken before.
I live on a farm down in England.
-I took it at 11 a.m.
On the way back to the main house, um...
I started to get this feeling,
-and everything was coming alive.
The grass starts talking to me...
Sting!
...and very quickly, I entered this psychedelic realm.
The trees are waving kind of musically at me.
Sting!
And I go past the farm,
and I have a guy who runs my farm called John,
who hails me over very urgently,
"Come on! I need your help!"
I said, "John, I'm, uh...
I'm actually busy."
He says, "No, you've gotta help me." I said, "Well, what is it?"
He said, "Well, one of the cows is having a problem birthing,
-and I need your help...
...because without your help, she'll die. She's in a, you know, a bad way."
And as he's speaking, I'm getting more and more high, and...
and disconcerted.
So I go over to him,
and she's in distress, she's crying, and she's in a great deal of pain.
What the experience does is it very clearly
presents you with the idea of mortality, right here,
and you cannot... You can't dodge it.
It's your own mortality, the mortality of this planet,
the mortality of this little steer who's being born, and its mother.
So you cannot get around that.
That is the central issue of consciousness.
One day we will not exist.
How do we... How do we deal with it?
So, we wrap some rope around the steer's forelegs and snout,
and my job is to pull
while he navigates the operation.
And we're getting covered in all kinds of amniotic fluid and stuff.
This operation takes about 20 minutes.
It's like pulling in a whale on a fishing boat.
And I'm getting higher.
And we eventually get the steer out.
His mother breathes a sigh of relief, and for me,
the entire universe has cracked open.
It was like the meaning of life.
You know, I think what the psychedelic experience does
is it takes...
the "it" out of "me and it".
It becomes me and thou.
Everything, you know, whether it's a tree,
or it's a river, or it's a piece of rock,
you realize that you are connected.
You know, you're made up of the same matter.
I think when you treat the world as just an object,
you tend to treat it badly.
If you see the world as part of you,
then you will treat it better.
You know, it's not something you want to do every day.
You have to prepare.
You need an intention.
You can say, "Okay, I'm going to have this experience,
and I'm hoping with this experience,
I will be able to write a song,
or I will write my novel,
or I will make love,
or I will treat my family better, I'll be a better citizen."
So if you have an objective,
and then you have the experience, then you'll be rewarded.
If your objective is to just get fucked up,
then you will get fucked up.
So, my advice is don't do that.
I'll be honest, I don't remember having a conversation about it,
I don't remember anything other than he handed it to us,
and we just went "boop," put it right in our mouths.
Didn't think one thought about it.
No thought went into it.
Could've been a big life decision.
I was a young comedian...
in New York City.
We used to hang out at the end of the night,
all the comics would hang out at this restaurant.
This old hippie-looking white guy walked in.
He had these, like, pretty substantial, like, white pieces of paper...
"Boop... Boop."
Forty-five minutes later...
"What was that, was that acid we took? I don't feel anything."
And it's always when you say, "I don't feel anything,"
it's usually kind of the tipping point.
Do I feel anything?
What is feeling?
What is feeling anything?
Oh, this is what tripping on acid is like.
And the hot chocolate came,
and the foam or the whipped cream was, like, breathing,
and it was too alive to drink.
We floated to Washington Square Park
with a gaggle of people we had never met before.
Semi-homeless, maybe-ish people.
And we found ourselves feeling each other's faces,
-and laughing and crying...
...and realizing huge things.
I remember saying, "Let's go back to my apartment."
- Ooh, yeah! - Yeah!
So we just ran.
Aww...
So we get in his car, and he pulls out,
and we get to the red light,
and the red light turns green,
and then yellow, and then red...
-...green,
and then yellow, and then red, then green, and yellow, and red.
He has forgotten how to drive.
For the life of him, he doesn't know how he even pulled out.
It was just muscle memory.
And then, he doesn't know what he's doing, how cars work.
"How does a car work?
We know how cars work?"
Let's don't drive.
Let's let... Let's have a sober buddy.
No driving, that's insane.
You want to be in the passenger seat.
You don't wanna be the driver.
I wanna be driving.
I don't wanna sit there and think,
"That person is seeing all the things I'm seeing,
I think I'd better drive."
You know when you see those white lines,
if you look way in the distance, they almost look like they're going up.
I remember sitting there driving the car,
and my hands are just doing this by themselves.
It's almost like I could just sit and look out the window or whatever,
'cause my body was driving the car.
I eventually stopped. I just completely stopped.
Because it's so steep,
but I'm not falling back.
And I don't know how that's possible, and then I realize...
I don't have my foot on the gas.
I've just coasted to a stop
on the Hollywood freeway.
The road went whoosh...
and disappeared.
And I saw nothing but total blackness.
And then there was this tiny little skull at the end of it.
And it came forward,
and in the skull was the road,
and the mouth opened, and, whomp, I got swallowed.
Don't drive on acid.
Hi, I'm Tommy Roe.
By now it must be obvious to you, as it is to me,
that LSD is very powerful stuff.
And that's just what it is: stuff.
Acid and mushrooms are the Coke and Pepsi of hallucinogens,
but there are lots of things that can make you trip...
But these are just the beginning of a list of compounds
that can cause the human brain to experience
altered states of reality and hallucinations.
I decided I would, um...
be initiated properly into peyote...
So I took a plane down to Mexico City,
and then we went out in a van to the mountains,
and we met these people who would initiate me into this peyote cult.
First of all, they cram massive amounts of peyote into your mouth,
I mean huge amounts, with strychnine,
and you look at this thing, and go, "This is poison."
-And they... keep stuffing it in.
And very quickly, I am very high.
You know, I mean, the desert already is a sort of surreal psychedelic experience.
You just have to look at one of these gigantic cacti.
You're in a sort of primal alien world.
Sting!
-Sting... -Ssssting!
And then they blindfolded me with three other initiates.
When you have your eyes closed,
you're in this three dimensional, uh... cartoon world.
You know, you're in a kind of space movie.
And we were forced to climb the sacred mountain,
I've forgotten the name of the sacred mountain, blindfolded,
high on peyote,
in the midday sun.
So, we're stumbling up this mountain, and it's quite a hike.
Anyway, eventually we get to the top in the early evening,
and I feel this kind of sprinkling on my head.
I think, "Oh, they're giving me a shower," because we were filthy dirty.
I open my eyes, and it's blood.
And I said, "What is this?" "Oh, it's deer's blood, it's part of it."
I'm having deer's blood poured on top of me.
And it was during the time of Halley's Comet.
Halley's Comet is quite something, especially when you're on peyote,
because it looks like a fiery dragon.
Quite fearsome, and very threatening.
But it didn't frighten me as much as this concept of mortality,
which is a constant with me.
This was something...
difficult and, I think, meaningful.
Drugs are great.
Psychedelics are so cool.
I love hallucinogens.
Give me some, now!
These are just some of the things you'll hear
on a typical playground these days.
Does that scare you?
It should.
Because today's kids are increasingly turning on,
tuning in, and dropping out.
Now, how do us "squares" wrap our heads around this terrifying trend?
Well, we watch videos, like this one,
about one little girl, let's call her Emily,
because that is her name,
and her...
-Hey, guys, what's up?
So, Emily, I'm throwing a party tonight,
and it'd be pretty rad if you came by.
No, remember we were gonna go have fun at your place,
doing safe stuff under your mom's supervision.
Parents get a bad rap, but... they're not so bad to hang around with.
C'mon, Emily, it'll be fun. There'll be tons of hard drugs there.
Okay, maybe I'll see you there.
I mean, how bad could it be?
Who's ready for some hard drugs?
Got some LSD,
some mushrooms,
acid, some blue heaven, purple haze...
I got blue sky on Mars,
I got Grandma's dentures.
I got Pac-Man...
We got Super Marios, we got Luigis,
we got Reagans, and some orange sunshine...
Oh, I'm in!
Orange sunshine doesn't sound too bad.
It has lots of names, Emily,
but it doesn't take being a math nerd like Maya to know what it equals...
A bad trip.
C'mon, Emily, just try one.
-Maybe just one.
- Don't do it, Emily. - Think about your future, Emily!
I think I'm tripping...
Weird...
That's every acid trip in a movie.
They have never, ever nailed it.
They always, in movies, will use, like, a fisheye lens.
They always pitch the person's voice way down,
so everything just looks distorted, you know, and the person's like...
"Hey, man, I'm on acid!
Oh, my God, I can feel my soul!"
The one thing I've seen in a movie that was pretty close
was in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There's a scene where Johnny Depp is in the casino,
and the floor is, like, kind of moving around and stuff.
Like, when I saw that, I was like, "Yes. That's acid."
I don't know how much acid you've taken,
but one of the constants in most of my trips during that period
is things would always happen while high on acid
that under no ordinary circumstances would happen.
Strange, and in this case, terrible things.
Hi, my name's Anthony Bourdain. Um...
I liked LSD a lot.
You know, I became a teenager just as the '60s were ending,
and, you know, I was cruelly disappointed that I'd sort of missed out
on the entire hippie era.
You know, I'd read about them in Life magazine,
when I was nine and ten years old, and that looked really good.
I thought, "I can't wait till I'm old enough to go to San Francisco
and take acid," you know?
People are jumping out of windows and stuff, it must be interesting.
And, you know, my parents were horrified by it,
so... that was something of an endorsement.
I know I was fully in the thrall of the works of Hunter S. Thompson,
And by fully in the thrall, I mean...
we thought Hunter Thompson was the coolest thing ever,
and we wanted to be just like him.
There's that Thompson image of, you know,
you know you're having a bad trip when you look down,
and you see your dead grandmother with a knife in her teeth
crawling up your leg.
That was funny to us, and we kind of...
We wanted to, if not experience that, to survive that.
For this weekend, we prepared ourselves for an early version of the road trip.
I told my parents that I was staying over at my friend's house
for a sleepover weekend.
He had use of the car, and, I think, a learner's permit.
This was the basic framework around which our master plan coalesced.
First we acquired some drugs.
A lot of acid, some weed, some Lebanese hash,
Gordon's gin, and two cases of Maximus super beer.
I don't know why we chose that brand.
Also, and this is important:
some Quaaludes.
And proceeded to take a lot of the drugs, including the LSD.
We set out for the dark heart of the Catskills.
So we're driving along, getting off on the acid,
and we encounter two hitchhikers.
Attractive-looking young women, they were exotic dancers.
One of them identified herself by the name Panama Red.
Experienced young women of the world in search of a ride.
We immediately let it slip as well that we were fully loaded
with a pretty dizzying array of controlled substances.
Unsurprisingly enough, this interested these two young delicate flowers.
We went back to her room.
And we smoke some weed, we smoke some hash...
-Uh-oh, careful, he's gonna attack!
It's not real. Look at this!
Then she reminded us that we had mentioned Quaaludes.
And I gave her one,
and she seemed to indicate that this was unsatisfactory,
that she would like two.
Two Parest-400's.
Now these motherfuckers were industrial strength,
powerful fucking Methaqualone.
Panama starts, with the help of all that liquor,
starts getting pretty high on that Quaalude as it's hitting in.
We are, by this point, ha... we're peaking, okay?
That part, things started to go wrong.
Well, things went wrong very quickly.
Panama starts modeling her outfits from her earlier years in Vegas.
Suddenly, Panama, mid-stride, her eyes roll up in her head,
and she keels over, stone dead on the fucking floor.
She's OD'd, she's dead,
and we've given her the drugs that have killed her.
Already in my mind, the police helicopters with their searchlights
would be swooping over the motel at any minute.
There will be, you know, special units with battering rams
coming in the windows and the doors.
What do we do now?
You know, "My parents think I'm sleeping at your house,"
and we're high. We're really, really high.
On the way over here,
you know, the sky is filled with colors and concentric circles,
and strange and, you know, wonderful things.
-Now, it's ugly and paranoid.
Reality has intruded in a seriously ugly way.
Before we came close to figuring out what happened,
she stirred and roused herself,
as if nothing had happened.
She stood up as if she collapses to the floor all the time.
We drank a lot of gin, and snorted coke off the Gideon's Bible.
I remember at one point excusing myself to go to the bathroom,
and looking in the mirror and seeing, uh...
you know, an Indian chief in full war-paint in the in the mirror,
looking up and... Looking in a mirror is never a good idea on acid,
but in this case, it was a really bad idea.
Don't look in the mirror. Cover the mirrors.
Not a great idea to look in a mirror.
Oh, my God, looking in the mirror is, like, the worst.
Like, looking in the mirror, and who am I, who do I see?
You can see through your skin.
Your skin is apparently more translucent, uh, when you're tripping.
You can see, like, the blood rushing through your vessels and the veins.
Especially if you have any self-esteem issues.
You know, it's just like... I mean, I've had, like, my face turns into a goat.
Doesn't matter what you look like, cover the mirrors.
Don't look in the mirror!
I'm Dr. Charles Grob, spelled G-R-O-B.
I'm a psychiatrist.
I'm a researcher
investigating the potential for a hallucinogen treatment model
to heal psychiatric illness
or heal addiction.
I've also conducted an FDA-approved study where we had permission
to use the alkaloid of hallucinogenic mushrooms, psilocybin,
in a treatment model for individuals with advanced stage cancer
who have reactive anxiety.
Overall, their quality of life improved noticeably.
No one had a bad trip,
no one had a serious physiological reaction.
So, we found that, you know, at the very least,
there was good potential in this treatment model,
and worthy of further controlled investigation.
Let's hear from young people who've had their reasons for being down on LSD.
Let's also hear from doctors, psychologists and other experts
who have tried LSD themselves.
The only time I think I've ever been able to understand myself
was on an acid trip.
Then things were really clear.
You know, I didn't have any one small bad trip.
I had one long pretty good one.
I had outfits that went with acid,
I had the music that went with acid,
uh... makeup that went with acid...
To me, it was a...
a ritual drug.
You wanna look at my house?
Okay, my house is the acid house.
It affected everything.
To me, it's so hilarious to have, like, drug anecdotes.
The very nature of what you're asking...
If you're doing drugs the right way, you can't tell an orderly story.
Hi, I'm Carrie Fisher, and...
I took a lot of LSD.
I think I'd heard about acid maybe from John Belushi.
But I did not have a problem with...
At that point, I didn't have a problem with drugs.
I had not gotten into the drug zone
that would ultimately prove to be my downfall,
which would be opiates.
You know, it would be hard to get...
What, are you going to get addicted to acid? You know, no.
And it's a very hard drug to take.
So, I would organize trips around to places in the world
simply to take acid there.
I would do these things, and forget that...
I looked like someone...
named Princess Leia, or whatever I was for people, and...
and so it's not a brilliant idea to then, you know, take acid and go running around.
So, yeah, I went to the Seychelles.
And we took acid, and...
Oh, my God, I was on...
on the beach, and there was no one else on the beach.
And so I'm with my Super 8 movie camera, that's when this was.
And I'm filming my friend,
and as this is going along, suddenly...
I sensed that...
there's been a disturbance in the force.
Don't put that in.
Uh, anyway, and I turn around, and by the way, I'm...
I can't imagine that I'm nude, but certainly I'm topless.
And we turn around,
and there are a busload of Japanese folk that have just arrived,
and it turns out where we are,
it's where they bring the tourists to have lunch from all the hotels.
I am at that time, I believe, Princess Leia, in a profound way,
and not...
clothed.
I took acid and went,
"Oh, I see, this makes sense."
And in fact, when I was first, uh, told I was bipolar,
well, I went in to see a doctor, and I said,
"Well, I felt normal on acid."
Why she might feel normal when taking LSD during the height of her fame,
it may have something to do with how unnatural it felt
being a public persona,
how disconnected she may have been from herself.
And how the LSD experience may have allowed her
to have accessed some core element, her core self,
and allowed her to feel more genuine in that regard.
Anyway, what happened was we took this Owsley acid.
We got really high.
We were in Central Park.
I'm holding onto the ground,
'cause it was hard to stay on the planet.
And I'm watching an acorn,
and it's moving a lot.
I never saw anything that wasn't there.
I just saw things that were there... misbehave.
Holy shit! You're Carrie Fisher!
You're fucking Princess Leia!
Oh, my God, I'm such a huge fan of yours!
And it's misbehaving...
Look at this. I got it at a garage sale. Huh?
Woo!
And misbehaving...
I'm talking to you, 'cause you're tripping your fucking balls off!
-No, just... No, no!
So I had to watch this acorn,
you know, basically choreograph itself.
You're in show business. Can I run something by you?
Tell me what you think, okay?
♪ I'm a nut ♪
♪ I'm a nut, nut, nut ♪
♪ I'm nuts ♪
♪ I'm a nut ♪
-What do you think? I'm still, you know-- -Shut up!
Oh... you don't like it.
So at that point,
the acorn was almost back to being itself.
Don't tell anybody what you saw here.
Shh!
-Shh...
Don't say nothin'!
As a psychologist,
I have to tell you that the understanding you think you have gained
just doesn't fit in with the facts.
The only real understanding you could gain
would come from having a bummer, and then analyzing it,
which would mean you'd have to want to try to have bummers,
and then attempt to understand them,
the way that psychologists analyze dreams.
Which, unless you are properly trained,
you cannot do by yourself.
Drugs, uh.... change your state of consciousness very dramatically.
So you run the risk of psychosis,
or what's called "a bad trip."
A bad trip is minimized the more you control your set and setting.
A "set" is who's the person having this experience,
their mindset, their vulnerabilities, their intention.
"Setting" is where you're doing it, how safe is the setting,
Don't take acid with... strangers,
or people who pretend to be your friends,
or friends of friends.
Pick your company well.
Do not ever take LSD with assholes.
You don't want somebody doing, "Oh, are you freaking out?"
"Oh, you feel it?
Oh, you feel your mind cracking?"
So crazy...
"Do you see pink elephants, man? Do you see pink elephants?"
If you've got a deep sadness or a problem,
that can often be dangerously enhanced.
You don't want a bunch of crazy stuff going on in your head,
like bad stuff that you're dealing with, like, "I just broke up with somebody,"
or, "I got caught masturbating in the coffee machine,"
because that sort of guilt and shame,
you know, just becomes bigger.
You wanna make sure you're strong mentally.
It's a journey that everyone must take on their own...
with friends.
Hang out with a couple of good friends in an enclosed space,
not enclosed, with some outdoors, enjoy the outdoors.
I'd suggest the woods. That's it, the woods.
Water nearby, a flowing river,
fucking trees, and beauty.
People always say
that you should trip in a meadow or somewhere natural,
and that's probably great, but I've never done that.
I've always been in New York City.
The first time I went to New York and just got high,
I thought the taxis were out to kill me.
Stay away from cities.
And now, back to Bad Trip.
Everyone will tell you that taking a trip will be fine,
as long as you control your set and setting.
But the only thing that is sure
is you are set on setting out on a...
"Orange" you glad we're friends?
I don't know, "orange" you?
You guys are acting really weird.
Yeah, guys, knock it off, it's not funny anymore.
You know what'd be funny? If I jumped out of a window.
That sounds like a great idea!
Yeah, do it!
-Okay!
What? No!
Not the window!
Drugs are a laugh riot... until they're not.
Hi, my name is Nick Kroll,
and I have a cautionary tale to tell about tripping. Um...
You know, it was super fun, I just want to caution people.
Couple of years ago,
uh, my friend's bachelor party,
rented a house up in Malibu,
and I procured a bunch of mushrooms for it
because, you know, dudes in their mid-to-late 30s
are just looking to, you know, fucking escape.
People were smoking salvia, so you knew it's a classy affair.
We're on some private beach in Malibu.
-We all take mushrooms.
I take a few more, just to be, like, "Yeah, it's cool, these are good."
- Higher! - Oh! I love my friends!
So we're having a good time.
I'm thinking, "I'm in the water, I'm tripping,
there's a 90% chance I'm going to drown,
but it's feeling good to be one with the Earth."
We get out of the water, now I'm on the beach, I'm starting to really roll,
and I sit down, and I've eaten more mushrooms than everybody else.
I see my buddies, and they are starting to gather a bunch of sea kelp.
I see this, and I'm like, "I understand what's going to happen now."
Oh, God...
They've come out of the water.
They're emerging with about 40 to 50 pounds,
and I just see them lift it,
and just put all of this sea kelp on my body.
And I was...
thrilled.
And the sea kelp starts to move on me,
and I'm like, "I am the kelp monster."
I am the kelp monster!
I couldn't even fathom wanting to remove...
this fucking detritus from the sea.
Kelp monster!
Uh... The next day I woke up,
uh, covered in red welts,
um, because I had, uh...
been covered in sea fucking kelp
for 45 minutes.
I don't really dig dropping pills, but you get the wildest trip on acid.
Yeah, but you can also get the wildest bummers.
You know, when there's, like, four corners or whatever, and...
you kind of get trained by stop lights
or by the walk sign and the don't walk sign or whatever,
and I remember all of a sudden being like, "Oh, I wanna get over there..."
And instead of going from here...
from point A, to point B, to point C, I was like,
"I could just go from point A to point C!"
-And it sounds really stupid,
but it's something acid gave me,
and then in my life I use it all the time, where I'm like,
"If no one's looking, I can just head straight to point C,
without doing this point B bullshit."
So, I'm Kathleen,
and this is Adam, we're married, we're both musicians. Tell yours.
My story that I wanted to tell...
isn't...
I've never had, like, a bad acid trip, or a bad mushroom trip,
like a freak-out.
Late '80s, I was with three friends, we were driving to...
My friend Money Mark said, "You gotta go to this place in Baja."
It's me and three women,
and we're just, like, in the middle of nowhere, in Mexico.
My friend was like, "Oh, I've got two hits of acid,
we should take 'em."
So we put them in a Snapple bottle, we all drank it.
And a tire blows.
With me and three women, and we're in the middle of nowhere.
I don't know how to change a tire, I don't even know if there was a tire.
You know, as I'm saying it, I don't even know...
I can't believe he didn't know how to change a tire!
I don't even know if we looked to see if there was another tire.
As we're like, "This is really grim..."
-a white owl flies right above us...
...and we're like, "It's a sign.
-Something great's about to happen!"
These two vans filled with dudes,
like, grown men,
pull up, and we're like, "Oh, this is great!
Oh shit, this is a little weird."
All these guys come out, and they're kinda walking around the car checking us out.
There are three hot girls in the car.
If I go with them,
they'll take me to a place... to a guy who has tires.
And so I'm like, "Look, I don't know if I'm coming back, you guys."
So we do the four-way hug, and we're like,
you know, "Good luck."
And so we drive, and we drive, and we take a turn further into the mountains.
It's like it's right out of a movie.
And there's all these old dudes sitting around by a campfire.
And there's these two cinder block shacks,
and I'm like, "Over there?"
Out of the shack comes the biggest person you've ever seen.
Overalls, no shirt,
he's backlit,
with the biggest fucking hammer you've ever seen in your life.
The more I was freaking out, the more they were laughing.
He turns over and then he starts banging on the door.
He opens the door, I'm like...
"Alright, this is it. This is...
I try to fight everybody here to get out, or I see what's in the room."
Turns the light on, it's filled with fucking tires.
It's filled with tires!
It's a church group.
The two vans are from a church group.
And they led us on our way, they told us, "Go back down this way..."
Wow. It all worked out fine.
It was the owl.
This is your brain.
This is your brain on drugs.
This is your brain on my sandwich.
Delicious.
Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it.
"Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building.
What a tragedy."
What a dick! Fuck him. He's an idiot.
If he thought he could fly, why didn't he take off from the ground?
There isn't a lot of stories of people leaping.
You know, that was the thing.
It was a lot of shit that was coming down the pipe
when we were originally taking it, you know, to kinda scare us off.
Both my parents were therapists,
and they worked in this, uh, psychiatric hospital.
And I guess the way my parents telling me not to do drugs
was by coming home and telling me
how messed up the kids were at the hospital
who did drugs only once.
My mom'd be like,
"This kid smoked marijuana, and it was laced with PCP,
and now he's insane, he doesn't know what to do.
He puts a fist up his butt, that's all he does."
That was literally a story my mom told me.
So I had the fear of God in me about doing any sort of drugs whatsoever.
I never did it. That is until I went to Amsterdam.
Hey, I'm Paul Scheer.
And this is my story about getting ridiculously high.
I went to Amsterdam with a bunch of my comedy friends to do some shows.
And it was like, "Wow, Amsterdam, like, marijuana's legal...
Wow! You can even do mushrooms. This will be amazing.
Alright, we have to have a mushroom day."
And we finally went to a shop, and, you know,
they bring them out like you would bring out diamonds at Tiffany's.
They have different types of mushrooms,
and we pick them...
I remember I picked something that was like "Hawaiian-something."
I was like, "Hawaii, that's cool, yeah, like surfing.
That's the kind of trip I want."
So we decided where's the best place to do it
and it would have to be the Van Gogh Museum.
So, we go into the Van Gogh Museum,
and, you know, we're just eating these mushrooms...
They say, "Don't eat the whole thing all at once, right?" "Fine."
So I'm eating these mushrooms. And about five minutes pass, I'm like...
"Pfft... I don't feel anything. These mushrooms don't work at all."
Well...
I'm Paul Scheer, in Amsterdam,
and I guess these mushrooms aren't kicking in.
And so I just eat more of them, and then more of them.
I guess I'll just enjoy the art.
I'm Paul Scheer in Amsterdam.
I look up at one of the paintings,
which is the crows over the cornfield,
and it really, like, grabs me, for some reason.
"Wow, this is really interesting. Oh, look at that!
I can see under the crows!"
I start to turn...
Because I'm convincing myself that if I turn,
I'm seeing parts of the painting that don't really exist.
Holy shit!
Look at all this corn!
All of a sudden, I feel like these birds are coming out at me,
-and I'm in the middle of this cornfield. -Whoa!
What the fuck?
Now, this is a popular museum.
Family, people are all there...
and I'm standing maybe four inches away from the painting,
almost upside down.
Like this, like, "Yes, yes, yes..."
And it's morphing and moving, I'm like, "Van Gogh, genius!"
I get Van Gogh!
Now I'm feeling a little bit too hot, I'm like, "It's hot in here, I'm sweating,
I gotta leave this museum."
I arrive back at the house that we're staying.
And I go, "Guys...
we need to get McDonald's."
And everyone's like, "Yes!"
I think my plan stemmed from the fact that we were in a foreign country,
and we needed to ground ourselves with something American.
So McDonald's was the way to go.
And I go into McDonalds,
they fill up a sack of burgers for me,
I take it back to our house,
and I toss them out to everybody, everyone starts eating the burgers,
and just like in Alice in Wonderland when she eats the pill,
we all finish our burgers,
and it just wears off, we're back to normal.
And I was like, "Thank you, McDonald's. You saved us."
Never had experience in McDonald's, because I'm not a fucking idiot.
If there's anything antithetical
to a trip on LSD, it's a McDonald's.
Talk about yin and fuck-yang.
You walk in there, and you realize, "I'm in the belly of the fucking beast.
I have a soul, and I'm in a soulless cage."
Hi, I'm Rob Corddry.
A psychonaut.
Screen Actors Guild.
Once we were on mushrooms,
and I sat in front of the mirror,
tripping my balls off,
high as a kite,
just, like, staring at myself in the mirror.
I had my shirt off,
which is usually something that bugs me,
but at this point, like, you don't have any body dysmorphia.
You see things for the way they really are.
No matter how much they sort of, like, shimmer and breathe.
Your body's breathing anyway.
And I'm, like, looking at it, my body, and my face,
for what it really, truly is.
It... You know, my face looked completely different.
My body, I understood it was a shell,
And I felt inside me, the real me, not in the mirror,
I felt bigger than my body, and I felt wider.
And I felt, like, "This is it."
Like, "We're part of everything, everything is connected."
And then I'd look in the mirror,
and I'd be like... I could see, it seemed, like...
the whole world was me.
I could see everything, everything was connected. All good.
People always say don't look in the mirror when you're high,
but I'm like, "Don't ever leave a mirror!"
Do look in the mirror!
I remember looking in the mirror.
My face turned into a gargoyle.
That shit was trippy. I was like, "Oh, shit."
Growing up in an urban community,
like the hood or some shit like that, we look at acid, like,
"Man, that's like crack, or like PCP, angel dust, meth or some shit like that.
The fuck you do with acid?"
And then as you get older, you know,
you start doing mushrooms and shit like that, and you realize that
all it is is, like, fungus and mold, and, you know,
this is just, like, some chill shit.
I remember the first time I did acid. It was a couple of years back.
I felt I was ready,
ready to become one with the planet,
the universe.
It was crazy. It was with a beautiful female.
She's the one who introduced me to it.
All I remember is she had it on, like, crackers already.
Unfortunately, by the time I got with her
is exactly when the acid just started kicking in.
And, you know, we gettin' jiggy and whatnot, right?
It feels so good.
Like, it's... Everything feels intensified.
I'm seeing all type of shit.
I'm feeling all type of shit.
Colors are moving. I hear colors.
I can taste the colors.
Like, what the fuck does a color taste like, you know?
And for some reason,
everything she did to me just felt...
amazing.
Like, times two.
Out of the ordinary.
And, uh... This is a bit graphic,
it's a bit vulgar, it's a bit raunchy, you feel me?
You feel me, but...
What can I say? It's life.
No lie...
A rainbow shot out of my dick.
And it had a sound with it, like a piano or some shit like that.
I have no idea why there was a rainbow...
coming out of my penis.
I don't even like rainbows.
And I woke up the next day and I told...
I told the homie, and I said, "Yo,
I know what the answer to life is."
And I said...
"It's to love each other."
He was like...
"Word."
That was my first time doing acid, man.
But to each his own, because...
I'm not a psychedelic advocate. Like...
you know, I have a good time with it.
It's not for everybody, let me say that.
You know, I'm an artiste, it's my lifestyle.
I'm on a, like, psychedelic, like,
1960s rock, like, you know, like...
The Castaways...
Jefferson Airplane...
The Rolling Stones had some shit, fucking Beatles, of course.
Jimi...
Who sings the "Hurdy Gurdy Man," is that Donovan?
A truly 1960s experience
was, "Is there an answer to the suffering of the world?"
Because until 1966 in October,
LSD was actually legal,
and was used in extraordinary, beneficial ways, as we all know.
We know now, from documentation,
how it helped so many people.
Anxiety drops.
People who are about to die, who get DMT, you know the story...
They are given some psilocybin,
and suddenly their anxiety disappears,
because they now feel,
"This is natural."
Never did ayahuasca or DMT.
I'm too scared, man.
You know, I admit it, but maybe I'll get to the point one day
when I feel brave enough to do it.
DMT is, like, you know, that is the express ticket
to, you know, the primordial ooze.
If you wanna see what it is like to be just an organic being,
absolutely watch your ego dissipate into nothingness,
smoke some DMT, and you'll get there.
You'll get there right away, and you will have
direct contact with aliens, and colors,
and ancient patterns, and sacred geometry, and...
it's amazing.
My name is Zach Leary,
and I grew up with Timothy Leary.
He was an American philosopher and psychologist of the late 20th century.
The first time that my dad did psilocybin in Mexico, you know,
his famous quote from the experience was,
"I learned more in my four hours on mushrooms
than I did in my previous 20 years of psychology."
Naturally, the psychologists and psychiatrists want to use LSD
in treating mental illness.
I think that LSD will be the number one, uh...
cure for mental illness
when the psychologists know how to use it.
And in 1963, he was...
fired quite ceremoniously from Harvard University,
for conducting psychedelic experiments with grad students.
Timothy Leary, and Ram Dass, and, you know, um...
Terence McKenna, and all these people who...
have spent their lives exploring those realms,
and then, they had also the knowledge and the genius to be able to study them,
were just shut down.
And so, we fucking blew it.
Well, I think it was a shame that the prior...
generation of psychedelic investigators
were abruptly stopped in their tracks,
because they were onto some very important discoveries.
And they were developing new treatment models,
which we feel today should still be explored,
because they might offer a great deal of promise and hope
for people who have suffered from conditions
for which mainstream psychiatry may not have much to offer.
There are many basic questions about LSD which remain unanswered.
There's much work to be done.
A good deal of important research lies in the future.
Hopefully, someday we'll have the answers.
People always ask...
what my best experiences were taking psychedelics with my dad.
I mean, we had some good ones, like Grateful Dead concerts.
Yeah, the visuals were really, like...
Gosh, I remember Jerry Garcia's head sort of swelling to ten times the size...
Going to a Grateful Dead show without drugs was okay.
But with drugs, it was pretty good.
Grateful Dead shows.
The greatest place to trip, because it was very safe.
There are facilities,
um... and kind of makeshift areas,
just for people who are tripping.
As much as I didn't care for the music,
I've probably seen the Dead...
I mean, yeah, I gotta say, like 11 or 12 times.
I liked Jerry Garcia.
I can admit that publicly, I'm not ashamed of that.
I appreciate the Grateful Dead. I mean, I went to college, I'm white...
I went on stage with the Grateful Dead,
and fell asleep in front of one of the speakers.
This is how you spot a guy at a concert having a good trip, this is how they walk,
because they're leading with their head, they're like... "Meeting life head on!"
But this is how you spot a guy tripping that's having a bad trip:
He's leading with his knees, he's like...
He wants the knees,
he wants everything but the head to meet the bad, bad shit head-on.
One time, uh... I had figured the wrong amount,
and I had taken so much that I looked over at Mickey and said,
"I can't finish the set, I gotta go to the dressing room."
My cymbals were melting, and...
You know, you can take too much, and that's a mistake.
I came home, and I was still real high. You don't come down instantly, of course.
And I sat down politely at my parents' dining room table,
and Mama's... It was breakfast, sun had just come up,
and she was serving breakfast, of course,
and served me a plate of eggs that looked like they were doing
some kind of new modern dance on the stage,
some of this new gyration stuff going on...
Everything's moving around, the sausages were dancing,
making little buildings and things,
"How's breakfast, Billy?" "Fine..."
I couldn't eat it.
And now, back to Bad Trip.
Do you like things happening to you that you wouldn't like happening to you?
Of course you don't.
Well, that's exactly what will happen when you go to a drug party.
Because at every drug party, there is a prankster.
His mission: to get you high, whether you want to be or not.
His scheme:
the dose.
-Guys. -Come on!
Orange soda!
- Take a sip! - Drink it!
-Drink it. -Take a sip.
Well, if they're not going to enjoy these fresh sodas, I am.
Yeah. Me too.
Whoa, why is everything like an electric rainbow?
Yeah! I can see the whole universe.
It sounds like you guys are tripping.
No... We didn't take any drugs.
That's not something I would ever do. Oh!
Did you see that dragon?
Are you sure you're not tripping?
I'm sure they are tripping...
because they've been dosed!
I put ten tabs of LSD in their sodas.
I never wanted this!
I'll never be the same!
I feel it's really wrong to dose anybody,
because you're taking over their psychology.
You're responsible for how they're going to be for 12 hours,
and if they haven't taken acid before, you don't really have a right to do that.
When we took the notorious wonder drug LSD,
we were having dinner with our dentist.
And he put it in our coffee, and never told us.
And we'd never heard of it.
I mean, it's a good job we hadn't , because there's been so much paranoia,
uh... created around the drug that people now, if they take it,
they're already on a bad trip before they start.
When the realization came that I was on acid...
bad trip, like a dark tunnel. I just shut down.
Hi, I'm Rosie Perez, AKA Puerto Rican icon. Holla!
It was New Year's Eve in the late '80s.
One of my sisters and I,
we were going to an after-hours club in Alphabet City.
They never sold alcohol or anything at this club.
It was all like, you know, "We're all into the music and dance,
and we're into our bodies, and health, and whatever,"
so they would only have punch there, or fruit.
So we get to the bar, we see the bartender,
and he's like, "Oh, what's up, girls?
You wanna get hooked up?" We're like, "Yeah, sure!"
And he goes, "Yeah?" I was like, "Yeah, alright."
So, he gives us this punch.
And we drink it down, and we start dancing,
sweating, go back...
"Can we have another punch?"
He's like, "For real?"
I was like, "Yeah, it's really good!" He goes, "Alright..."
We drink another glass.
All of a sudden...
the entire nightclub started to expand.
The floorboards... The wooden floorboards
were waving as if they were water on the high seas,
and I'm looking at it,
going, "This is beautiful... Oh, my gosh!"
So I went on my back,
and I started doing the backstroke on the floorboards,
because they were waves, of course, right?
And everything's just beautiful, and everybody's watching me,
and I'm just, like, in my glory,
and then all of a sudden my sister Sally walks over
and goes, "Your tits are out." And I went, "Oh..."
And I looked down, and I was like, "Oh, my God!
They look gorgeous!"
And they looked beautiful,
and I was in awe of their beauty and their size.
But then I started looking around,
and I thought everybody was looking at me, right?
And I got real paranoid.
So I kept trying to cover them up, because I couldn't find my top,
because my top was floating in the wood water, right?
So I'm covering my breasts like this,
and my titty fat kept squeezing between my fingers.
Right? And so it was just like...
My sister comes over, and she starts cracking up.
She goes, "Come on, we gotta get out of here!"
We get to the house, get upstairs,
and when I laid into the bed, I became the bed.
My body was the bed.
And I'm trying to flip myself over, like, my body, that's the mattress,
and I'm waddling down the hallway,
still didn't occur to me that I was high on acid.
And I slid,
and I'm thinking that the hallway has now become a slide,
and I'm sliding down the hallway, all the way down.
I went, "I'm a bed...!"
And I slid, and I...
busted my ankle on the porcelain bathtub.
Then I thought my foot was this humongous thing,
and it just kept growing, and growing, and growing.
I look up, and my boyfriend,
he tells me, "You're high on acid."
My first thought wasn't, "Oh, my God, I'm high on acid."
My first thought was, "Oh, my God,
I hope God doesn't punish me because I'm high on acid."
Because I just thought, you know, "He has... I'm going to hell.
I'm going straight to hell."
Prior to this, I didn't drink,
I didn't smoke weed,
I didn't smoke cigarettes...
I did nothing. My high was dancing.
When you go to a nightclub and someone offers you a free drink,
ask what the fuck is in it.
Yeah.
The other part of it that I got from it
is that I really, really needed to seek therapy
in regards to my Catholic upbringing.
God forbid, I never want to be burdened with that much guilt
ever again in my life.
So, you know what?
I guess being on acid did kinda do me good.
The mental effects of this material are tremendously variable.
They are completely unpredictable.
You cannot tell for any given individual
if he's going to have a good trip or a bad trip.
I don't think they've been able to identify the foci in the brain
that might be responsible for a bad trip.
But internally what's going on is a sense of disorientation,
confusion,
a sense of being overwhelmed by stimuli,
high levels of anxiety, even bordering or going into paranoia.
I've done a lot of acid, I've done shrooms, I've done speed...
I don't know what this was...
It was very speedy...
-very speedy... -Oh, yeah!
...but you also hallucinated.
-It turned the world around you... -Yeah.
-...into an opera of your nightmares. -Yeah.
Everything in my brain just switched,
and everything went drastically downhill, like...
at an incredible rate.
Things would turn into glass and crystal, and then they would break,
then form back up in front of your eyes, and then break again.
My legs started to go numb.
I started to feel my heart beat in my chest, really quickly,
and it felt like it was going to pound through my rib cage.
I didn't want to say anything to my wife,
because I didn't want her to affirm how strong this was,
and then my paranoia would increase even more,
making the nightmare that much more intense.
I saw violence, I saw bloodshed,
I saw warfare, I saw terrorism,
I saw beheadings,
I saw hell.
At one point, I remember looking out the window of the car,
and there was a little girl in the backseat of the car next to us,
like, looking at me, like, really intensely.
This little girl can save me. This little girl can get help.
She can get me out of this situation
She was a child. She was innocent.
I remember trying to communicate to her with my eyes,
like I was a hostage, like, "Get me outta here."
I didn't want to talk, 'cause I didn't want my friend to hear me and kill me.
And so I was like... I can see there's a glimmer of hope.
Finally, the little girl, like, flips me off,
and then in my head, I'm like, "I think everybody is in on this.
Everybody is trying to kill me!"
Some people...
will reach the peak of these mental effects right here,
and they will stay there.
From here on out, these people are insane.
Uh... I'm Lewis Black.
And I'm still Lewis Black.
That's all I need to say is "I'm Lewis Black," right?
I did acid when I was about 20.
I took it in an apartment, in a place called Hyattsville, Maryland.
When you reach this point, you're gone,
and the point I got to was that I couldn't remember my name.
And it's... I can't remember my name at all.
One of the things that is a linchpin between you and those around you
is your fucking name.
It's kind of really important.
The shortest distance between two points
is for me to just turn to one of them and say, "What's my name?"
But you can't, in the middle of an acid trip,
turn to your friends and ask them what your name is.
Now, I don't know what acid etiquette is, but I just thought, "You don't..."
They're having fun. There's no reason that I should destroy their fun.
Nor should I bring up something that would show as if I'm in trouble,
so they would feel like they had to take care of me,
which might even be worse.
So, now I sat with a dictionary,
looking for hints of what my name might be.
This goes on for half an hour,
which, in LSD time, is probably 26 years.
I reached into my pocket,
'cause I realized that I had a wallet,
and that I could find my name.
And, truly, my next thought was...
I was afraid to open my wallet because I thought,
"What if there's nothing in there but Monopoly cards?"
No!
First it terrified me, and then I couldn't stop laughing,
and then I found my name again.
And then things kind of got back on track.
Guys!
My name is Lewis Black.
I've seen people bug out.
So that's the only reason why I don't recommend it for everybody.
I'd be lying if I said it's for everybody, it's not.
"Just give it to me, yeah, I'm ready, let's go!"
I was so not ready to take acid.
It was a huge mistake.
In retrospect, I didn't realize how much it was going to change my life.
Because it really changed my life for a long time.
I just thought, "Alright, here we go, this is gonna be great."
I think we'd seen Hair recently, which was a big influence.
♪ LSD ♪
Well, I was hoping for some sort of psychedelic, uh... revelation,
uh, kind of Hair-like, you know,
with just amazing sort of imagery,
and just, you know... just sort of some sort of opening
into some sort of other form of consciousness.
And it just... It was not that at all.
It was, uh, just fear and anxiety...
being... Just being amplified.
Which is not, you know, I... like, who needs that?
Who needs to take a drug to have that happen?
So I took one,
half an hour goes by, 45 minutes go by,
an hour goes by...
We're hanging out, and, of course, nothing's happening.
Another half-hour goes by.
Now it's an hour and a half, and nothing's happening, so, of course...
I say to him, "We gotta take another."
So we took another, and then something happened.
Immediately, I started to freak out and get really scared.
I started looking at my hand,
doing the cliche thing of, like, pondering what my hand was.
Isn't there always that thing of just, like, staring at your hand?
Or, like, your thumb, and, like, seeing the whole universe in your thumb,
that kind of thing...?
What is going on in your brain when you are tripping?
Well, roughly 10% of your brain is consumed by sound and color,
another 10% by the concept of time,
which has been known to speed up and/or slow down.
And the other 80%?
Staring at your hand.
Whoa, that's cool...
I'm freaking out. I said, "Let's just go to my house."
And we were walking towards where they blow up the balloon animals
for the Thanksgiving Day Parade,
and I started to trip out on that idea.
-Evil... giant... inflated characters
were flipping up and coming out of 77th Street.
I was a big Ghostbusters fan,
and so the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man image
of him coming down Central Park West was sort of in my mind...
and then very quickly realizing that I had no idea where I was,
who I was,
or what this whole... the whole context of life was.
I decided that I needed to talk to my parents
to tell them what was happening to me.
And my parents were out of town, filming a Love Boat episode.
♪ The Love Boat ♪
♪ Soon we'll be making another... ♪
I called Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara on the phone...
...and I said, "Dad, I took some acid."
And he said, "What? What is acid?"
I think he might have thought I drank some battery acid or something.
It wasn't like my dad was Jerry Garcia.
He's Jerry Stiller.
And I said, "LSD."
And he's like, "Oh, LSD."
And I could hear him processing it.
I think the immediate thought was
I think he was thinking he'd failed as a parent.
I think that was what was probably going through his mind.
And then my dad said,
"I understand what you're going through.
When I was ten years old, I smoked a Pall Mall cigarette,
and I was sick for two days."
And I said, "No, Dad, that's not what I'm going through.
This is a whole different experience."
I tried to explain to him what it was, and he basically said...
He just said it's going to be okay, which actually was really... sweet.
When someone consumes a drug, and they feel they're going crazy,
the biggest fear is, "Oh, my God,
I'm never going to return to being myself again.
I'm always going to be crazy."
"My brain is broken, and I'm never, ever coming back."
"Maybe this is just my brain now.
And this is now how the world actually is."
And that's... That can be scary.
You know, "This isn't going well.
I want this to end. How do we make this end?"
"Oh, my God.
This is never going to end.
I'm going to go into a mental institution,"
and then I would see my mother's face in the window of the padded cell,
bawling her eyes out.
You cannot coax a person out of their bad trip.
And once it's in their system, it takes its own time.
The most important intervention you can make
is just to reassure them that they're experiencing this altered state,
as frightening as it is,
but they're experiencing it because they ingested a compound.
The bad news is they're in a scary place,
but the good news is it's going to be time-limited.
I think the first time I had such an experience,
I had those kind of naive... feelings. You know, "Maybe I won't be normal again."
But I've had enough experiences to realize that that's not true.
When in doubt, zoom out.
Um... If you're fearful of something, you just need to zoom away from it,
so you can see the larger context, and go, "Okay, that's not a big deal."
Things get scary.
But that's why it's important to remember you're high.
It's not reality.
I'm literally just falling in my mind,
and I'm like, "I gotta go to the emergency room.
I can't handle this anymore."
There's one of those dudes sitting in front of me,
who's, like, you used to see them at Dead shows,
they've clearly been on too many trips.
They sort of move at a different frequency than other people.
They're like, "Hey, man." They've got this weird... you know.
So I just tap him on the shoulder, and I look at him, and go,
"Pretty soon, Jerry's gonna come out,
and him and his guitar are gonna be, like, one thing."
And this guy just looks at me and he goes...
"Just hang on, man."
And he turns back around, and I was like, "Okay."
And that was, like, the best advice I ever got. And I use it to this day.
Just hang on, man.
Thanks, Fred.
And now for the horrifying conclusion of Bad Trip.
Knock, knock, knock.
"Who is it?"
"It's a deranged drifter
who wants to torture you for the next 12 hours,
by slowly peeling your skin off your body,
then plucking out your horror-filled eyeballs
and feeding them to you on a soft pretzel roll
made of your own epidermis."
"Oh, sure, great!
Come on in!"
Sounds crazy, right?
Well, that's exactly what you're doing
when you open your brain, the door,
to hallucinogenics, the deranged drifter.
Let's check in with Emily and her friends
now that they have willingly agreed to have their brains dissected,
metaphorically,
by the deranged psycho of psychedelics.
We definitely made the right choice getting out of that party.
They wouldn't let us back in after we broke all those windows.
- Oh, no! -Look out!
Well, you've seen two sides of the LSD psychedelic question.
But if you really think of it,
there's been about 20 sides to the question.
While it's possible that some things were left out,
we did hear from the most important and most strongly felt opinions about LSD.
Now it's your turn.
You decide.
You know, what we call everyday reality,
is a projection of consciousness.
In reality, there's no such thing as colors or sounds,
or textures, or tastes, or smells,
in the so-called real world.
The real world is a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.
It's a fluctuation of energy and information in an infinite void.
The sky that an insect sees is not the sky you and I see.
A honey bee experiences, um,
ultraviolet radiation
I have no idea what that looks like, you know?
So when a honey bee looks at a flower,
it doesn't see a flower the way you and I see,
although it can sense honey from a distance.
-A snake experiences infrared radiation.
-A bat experiences the echo of ultrasound.
A chameleon's eyeballs swivel on two different axes.
You can't even remotely imagine what this would look like to a chameleon.
So, what's reality?
And the answer is there's no such thing.
These compounds, when utilized under optimal conditions,
seem to have a rather remarkable facility
for catalyzing spiritual-level experiences,
which by their very nature
may be... may have the potential to be transformative.
It enhanced my ability to navigate the world,
to be in a family,
to relate to my children,
to relate to my wife, to my colleagues.
Um... It teaches me about community,
and it teaches me that the core of all religious thought ought to be...
"Let me treat others the way I want to be treated myself."
Whenever it was a good trip,
I would think, "Oh, my God, we're all one.
Uh... Death is not something to fear.
Life and death are really walking hand-in-hand with each other,
and it's cool."
The first time, or the first couple times I tripped,
I... I really did believe every single person,
the planet would be a better planet if everybody took acid once.
Did it make me smarter? Did I become enlightened?
I don't know. But I think it...
It enabled me, early on, to imagine another point of view.
Another perspective.
I think it made me a better person,
both creatively, and in every other way.
I'd rather be a person who's had that in his past
than somebody who missed it.
Even now, in my adult life,
I continue to experience it as a very psychedelic adventure,
that is, like, a, you know, a baffling nonsensical riddle.
Let's face it, we're all gonna die, so, you know...
It was kind of like jumping out of an airplane.
About a second-and-a-half into it, I realize,
"Oh, I never need to do this again, ever, in my life.
I don't ever want to do this."
That was sort of my experience with acid a few minutes into it,
only it lasted for another six hours.
That was the problem.
I think what I'd say to anyone tripping for the first time
is be moderate.
It's the haircut theory: you can always cut more off.
But once you cut too much, once you've taken too much,
there's no turning back.
I thought I'll never do that again,
but I did, a few more times.
You should not take it cavalierly. I don't know if you should take it.
In the sky, I see a giant zipper.
And the zipper starts to open.
Now, if you go with the flow,
you let the zipper open.
And you just fucking deal.
If they're bats, if it's God's penis, whatever.
You just do it.
Okay, if you have any fucking sense when it comes to drugs,
you don't stop the zipper.
I'm always looking to evolve as a human being.
I think we do that by thinking out of the box, you know.
We have to accept that the box is just a construct.
It's something that we've been conditioned to accept,
but it's not particularly useful.
Everything is in crisis.
How are we gonna survive the crisis?
How do we get over the other side of the wall?
And so we need to use whatever tools it takes
to get over the other side.
It's like a step ladder to look over a brick wall
that's a little bit too tall for you.
You use a stepladder, you get to see this crazy landscape
that you kind of had an inkling about every time you walked by this wall,
and then some people, you know, can sit in front of the wall,
and, like, meditate, and then the wall becomes transparent,
and they see beyond it, you know?
So, there are many pathways to arrive at the same realization.
It's a tremendous asset,
freedom to learn about it,
and not have our government stop us from learning things
that could really be... Same with marijuana.
I mean, they take away all the possible discovery
of all the medicine it could be.
What I would envision
really would be a certified retreat center,
you know, preferably close to nature,
where individuals can go and have a treatment,
and have expert facilitators help guide them through the experience,
and afterwards help them integrate that experience into their lives.
If I may say so, the whole consciousness revolution
that started in the '60s,
which led to other movements,
the feminist movement,
the ecology movement,
the peace movement,
uh, Greenpeace, all of that,
began, um...
with the use of hallucinogenic drugs.
Many people think that it peaked and it went away.
Uh... I'm sorry to inform you, the awakening is still going on.
We're on a trip all the time.
Right now we're on a trip, right? Life is a trip.
Lots of people drink coffee before they go to work.
Others, believe it or not, drop acid.
Now, why some psychiatrists and researchers
are giving psychedelic drugs a second look
as a possible way of treating depression and some mental illnesses.
They're being used to treat depression, anxiety, and addiction.
The early results are impressive.
They're relatively non-toxic, less toxic than alcohol.
They're non-addictive.
The DEA says it's granted permission to more than 50 researchers
to study the therapeutic effects of LSD.
Denver has become the first city in America
to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms.
The city of Oakland is now the second city in the US
to decriminalize the adult use and possession of magic mushrooms.
The Santa Cruz City Council unanimously approved the resolution.
This decriminalizes the use, possession and cultivation
of psychoactive plants.
If you could use a drug, and this has been done now,
that could stop you smoking cigarettes or being an alcoholic,
you know, working maybe 80% of the time, at least initially...
Yeah.
We gotta explore how that's possible.
Let's you and I do some mushrooms.
-Alright. -Let's do it.
Good luck!
♪ Whatever you want from me ♪
♪ Whatever you want, I'll do ♪
♪ I'll try to squeeze a drop of blood ♪
♪ From a sugar cube ♪
♪ Try to be more assured ♪
♪ Try to be more right there ♪
♪ Try to be less uptight ♪
♪ Try to be more aware ♪
♪ Whatever you want from me ♪
♪ Is what I wanna do for you ♪
♪ Sweeter than a drop of blood ♪
♪ From a sugar cube ♪
♪ And though I like to act the part Of being tough ♪
♪ I crumble like a sugar cube ♪
♪ For you ♪
♪ Whatever you want from me ♪
♪ Whatever you want, I'll do ♪
♪ And I will try ♪
♪ Whatever you want from me ♪
♪ Whatever you want, I'll do ♪
♪ I'll try and squeeze a drop of blood ♪
♪ Squeeze a drop of blood From a sugar cube ♪
Good night.