The documentary film just released by Netflix delves into the history of psychedelic drugs, and celebrates their cultural impact, while reflecting on their powerful role in the treatment of mental health, especially in recent years.

Sting's first psychedelic experience occurred on an English farm when he was a teenager. Young Sting had taken some peyote when a neighbour asked him to help him deliver a calf; there were complications, and the mother cow's life was in danger. At the peak of his peyote high, the cow managed to give birth, and Sting had an epiphany, amidst a flood of blood and multi-coloured amniotic fluid. "It was like the whole universe opened up. It was like the meaning of life," explains the future leader of The Police in the documentary Have a Good Trip! just released by Netflix.

Have a good trip! is a documentary about psychedelic journeys, with hilarious testimonies and original, meticulous production. Each anecdote is illustrated with cartoons (of course!), recreating the trip narrated by those featured. Above all, the film directed by Donick Cary represents a psychedelic "coming out of the closet" for a few celebrities, from the late Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia of Star Wars) to Ben Stiller, from now-fogeys like the singer Donovan, to guru Deepak Chopra, who seems to pop up just about everywhere.

The Netflix documentary is, therefore, a political act: all these celebrities not only survived their crazy trips with LSD, DMT, peyote, ayahuasca and magic mushrooms , but also enjoyed them tremendously, and managed to lead rich, deep and successful lives, belying the clichéd image of spaced-out zombies spread by prohibitionist propaganda.

The MC hosting the show is a scientist, played by Nick Offerman, who parodies the anti-drug campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s and, instead of cautioning the audience, instructs them and encourages the responsible use of psychedelic drugs. Offsetting this is a series of advertisements, also parodies, set in the 1980s, in which every psychedelic adventures inevitably ends with a "bad trip".

The crazy professor, explaining the differences between drugs.

It's not easy to decide which is the craziest adventure of the dozens in the film, but we were struck by the one that actor Paul Scheer shares about his first trip to Amsterdam: the New York comedian had consumed some hallucinogenic mushrooms, and then proceeded to visit the Van Gogh Museum. That is, he engaged in two activities almost mandatory for any tourist visiting Amsterdam... but at the same time, with the understandable result: he really "got into" Van Gogh's paintings.

Then there was the bad trip suffered by Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, on acid while riding in a convertible across the Nevada desert, accompanied by three groupies, in a positively Hunter S. Thompson-like scenario. The convertible broke down in the middle of nowhere, and there appeared three vans full of burly Mexicans who seized the singer and "guarded" the girls. For the rest of the story, you'll have to see Have a Good Trip!

You can watch Have a Good Trip! on Netflix.