6 celebrities on their wildest psychedelic experiences, from Carrie Fisher flashing tourists to Sting helping a cow give birth
- The documentary "Have a Good Trip" on Netflix discusses psychedelic drug research and what it's like to trip on LSD, "magic" mushrooms, peyote, and other substances.
- The film is infused with celebrities' anecdotes from their own psychedelic experiences. Anthony Bourdain, Sting, Sarah Silverman, and others share tales on camera.
Netflix's new documentary "Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics" delves into research on psychedelic drugs like LSD and "magic" mushrooms and how these largely illegal substances could help treat anxiety and depression.
But the film's most entertaining moments come from celebrities like Anthony Bourdain, Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, and A$AP Rocky, who all recount the wildest psychedelic drug trips they've experienced.
In the documentary, which premiered on May 11, rapper A$AP Rocky told viewers a rainbow shot out of his penis after he took LSD. When Sting did psychedelics, the grass started talking to him. And for Rosie Perez, her psychedelic trip made it feel like her body became one with her mattress.
The detailed anecdotes reveal just how many famous folks have had otherworldly experiences and hallucinations, and offer insight (or just plain old entertainment) into what it could be like for a psychedelics newbie to trip for the first time.
Sting was on peyote when he helped a cow give birth
Sting said he viewed his his many psychedelic trips as a "valuable experience." The 68-year-old singer said he's had bad trips, but they've always taught him something and put his ego into check.
He recalled on particular trip in which his friend John gave him peyote, a psychedelic naturally found in a type of cactus plant, which he'd never taken up until that point.
Sting said he took the peyote at 11 AM while living on a farm, and after an undisclosed amount of time, "the grass starts talking to me, and very quickly, I enter this psychedelic realm."
"The trees are waving kind of musically at me," he continued.
Then John approached him and asked Sting to help him assist a cow on the farm who was about to give birth.
"What the experience does is it presents you with the idea of mortality right there," Sting said, pointing at his forehead. "It's your own mortality, the mortality of the planet...that is the central issue of consciousness," when tripping on a psychedelic drug, he said.
He and John successfully helped the cow give birth, and during the 20 minutes it took, he became increasingly high. "For me, the meaning of the universe cracked open," he said.
Sarah Silverman went to a park and touched homeless people's faces
Silverman, a comedian, said "not a lot of thought went into" her first psychedelic trip, which took place in New York City where she was working at the time.
She was hanging out at a go-to restaurant with her comedian friends, when she saw a "hippie" walk into the venue.
"He had these pretty substantial white pieces of paper...boop, boop," Silverman said to signify she and her friend took them from the man when he offered, and put them on their tongues. It was LSD, or "acid."
She said they started tripping 45 minutes later.
"And the hot chocolate came, and the foam or the whipped cream was, like, breathing, and it was too alive to drink," she said.
"We floated to Washington Square Park with a gaggle of people we had never met before. Semi-homeless, maybe-ish people. We found ourselves feeling each other's faces and laughing and crying and realizing huge things," Silverman said.
Then, she and her friend got into his car, and they drove up to a red light. When the light turned green, her friend froze, and that's when Silverman realized he'd forgotten how to drive.
"He doesn't know what he's doing, how cars work," she said.
Anthony Bourdain thought he'd killed someone after taking various drugs at once
The late Bourdain, whose interview was conducted before he died in 2018, said he took a lot of LSD growing up.
"You know, I became a teenager just as the 60s were ending, and you know, and I was cruelly disappointed I missed out on the entire hippie era," he said.
One weekend, Bourdain and his friends each said they were staying at another friend's house.
Instead, they bought and took acid, weed, and Lebanese hash, a drug derived from the resin of the cannabis plant, and Quaalude's, a synthetic depressive drug, and then drove to the Catskill mountains in upstate New York.
They picked up two women hitchhikers who worked as dancers on the way. "We immediately let it slip as well that we were fully loaded with a pretty dizzying array of controlled substances, " Bourdain said. The women ended taking them too, and they all went back to one of the women's homes.
Once one of the women took a Quaalude as Bourdain and his friend hit their peak high, and that's when things started to go downhill.
"Panama [one of the women] 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 f-----g floor," Bourdain said.
At that moment, Bourdain and his friend started to form a plan for how to escape the crime scene. Then, Panama woke up, and they continued to drink and do other drugs like cocaine.
"I remember at one point excusing myself to go to the bathroom and looking in the mirror and seeing an Indian chief in full war-paint in the mirror looking up," he said.
Carrie Fisher accidentally flashed tourists while on acid
"I think I maybe heard of acid from John Belushi, " Fisher, whose interview was recorded before she died in 2016, said.
She said whenever she took acid, she would plan the experience around her world travels and do psychedelics in various destinations.
"I would do these things and forget I looked like someone named Princess Leia, or whatever I was for people then, and so it's not a brilliant idea to then take acid and go running around," she said.
Once, while in the Seychelles, Fisher took acid on the beach with a friend. She said she was topless on the beach and when she turned around, "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."
Nick Kroll's friends covered his body in sea kelp while tripping on mushrooms
Kroll, a comedian and actor, said he brought a bunch of "magic" mushrooms to his friend's bachelor party in Malibu, where they'd rented a house for the weekend.
While hanging out on a private beach, Kroll and his friends took the 'shrooms, and Kroll said he took a bit more than everyone else, "just to be like, 'Yeah, it's cool, these are good.'"
After hanging out in the ocean while tripping, Kroll said he went back to the sand and started to hit his peak high.
"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,'" Kroll said. "They're emerging with 40 to 50 pounds [of sea kelp] and I just see them lift it, and just put all of this sea kelp on my body," which he continued to leave there for 45 minutes.
The sea kelp felt like it was moving while on his body, and Kroll said he loved it and dubbed himself the Kelp Monster.
"I couldn't even fathom wanting to remove this f-----g detritus from the sea. The next day I woke up covered in red welts," he said.
Comedian Paul Scheer thought he was inside a Van Gogh painting after taking mushrooms in Amsterdam
During a tour in Amsterdam, Scheer, a comedian and actor in "The League," took mushrooms in the Van Gogh museum with friends.
He said he didn't feel any effects after an hour, so he ate more.
"I look up at one of the paintings, which is crows over the cornfield and it really, like, grabs me for some reason...All of a sudden I feel like these birds are coming out at me and I'm in the middle of this cornfield," he said, adding that he was standing about four inches from the painting while other visitors watched him.
Scheer started to feel overheated, so he left the museum and went back to his hotel with friends and they proceeded to order McDonald's "because we were in a foreign country and needed to ground ourselves with something American."
He said after eating the burgers, he and his friends came down from their high.
- Read more:
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- Denver just became the first city in the US to decriminalize magic mushrooms. Here's what they do to your body and mind.
- A best-selling author tried LSD, 'shrooms, and DMT — and wrote about all 3 psychedelic trips