Have a Good Trip is a gateway drug to de-stigmatizing psychedelics

Sting, Sarah Silverman, Ben Stiller, and the late Carrie Fisher and Anthony Bourdain are among the celebrities interviewed for the new Netflix documentary Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics.

Carrie Fisher had a psychedelic-induced encounter with a talking acorn. Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann recalls the time he dropped too much acid and his cymbals began melting mid-set, forcing him to leave the stage. Ben Stiller admits he only dropped acid once and had such a bad trip that he called his parents, Jerry Stiller (who died just this week) and the late Anne Meara. These are just a few of the celebrity psychedelic experiences recounted in the entertaining new documentary film, Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, now streaming on Netflix.

(Mild spoilers below.)

Psychedelics get their name from the Greek root words for "mind revealing," since they can alter cognition and perception. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide)is perhaps the best known, along with its popular siblings psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms); 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), aka ecstasy (or molly); peyote, made from the ground-up tops of cacti that contain mescaline; and ayahuasca, a bitter tea made from a Brazilian vine with the active ingredient dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Most are classified as Schedule 1 substances by the US Drug Enforcement Agency, meaning they are not deemed to have any potential medical benefits. But this is largely a remnant of the "culture wars" that raged in the 1960s and 1970s.

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