The Rise and Rise of Psychedelics | High Society

so today we're going to share with you a beautiful preparation for the medicine that we've just taken and they might be crying they might be screaming there might be a whole range of stuff we're opening ourselves up energetically follow my lead [Music] [Music] the uk is experiencing a psychedelic renaissance everyone should try lsd at least once in their life young people in england and wales are taking three times more lsd than they did five years ago is this your first time taking acid yeah scientists at top universities are claiming hallucinogens can revolutionize how we treat mental illness psychedelics used in a particular way can improve mental health outcome and the use of magic mushrooms has been increasing by around 40 percent year on year in the uk psychedelics have the highest possible drug classification but recent studies have shown that they're the safest recreational drugs you can take my personal opinion is that it's just something that grows out the ground radically mind-altering substances are now more readily available than ever before what is making this new generation of drug takers so interested in self-transformation and as the self-help trend grows will they still be considered safe when thousands of people start trying to solve their mental health issues themselves by taking powerful hallucinogens in unregulated settings i'm currently lying in the grass at a british music festival and i've come here to find out just how rampant psychedelic use really is for what i've seen so far there appear to be quite a few people here who are tripping their balls off what kind of psychedelics are you taking today probably tanga and uh some mushrooms got some lsd 240 micrograms i'm going to take off what have you guys taken today [Music] 2cb how long ago did you take it i'm no i don't know what time it is which ones have you taken today australian gold cup so what have you got with you today soliciting mushrooms and how do you take it awesome when i take shrooms i get really horny if you had to describe your mental state right now to someone who's never done psychedelics before what would you say amazing yeah it's actually better than booze yeah you can learn from the psychedelic experience everyone has these doors in their brain and sometimes they can be open for healing purposes which is really really great one thing i've noticed is like people who take a lot of psychedelics think that the illuminati control the government like aliens exist i do okay i do think the illuminati control the government we can't be the only people in this universe there must be something else out there yeah aliens exist psychedelic drugs have become so popular that festivals have had to start providing services like psycare to deal with the influx of people having bad trips roughly how many people use your service an average of 60 people across the weekend what would happen if someone came through here and was having a bad trip we'd do a like a bit of a triage kind of a little risk assessment if you like so we tend to keep this one as like a more of a quiet space we are sort of informed by indigenous use of plant medicines and we have an altar here which we feel is important but if someone's sort of in a really bad state i imagine no amount of crystals and and sort of nice fabrics it's going to really calm them down probably wouldn't bring them in here we take them into the other tent that's kind of set up for people who are maybe potentially going to be a little bit more disruptive or kind of louder there's a case that springs to mind how do you deal with people who take all the clothes off there is one notorious case in psycare's history which took two dozen volunteers and six security guards to resolve it led to the phrase going full christian i think that day in the sense of amino they say bravado uh took far too you know many magic mushrooms i was kneeling down in front of notre in tears kissing the the the roots and apologizing on behalf of humanity for pillaging the earth and then one security guard came two three four right dude put your clothes back on and essentially my mind at that moment switched into defense mode and so literally felt like a line that was about to be uh poached and this sort of surge of power you know came up from the ground it literally went security guy went flying up in the air i made a naked beeline dove into the middle of the crowd trying freedom and next thing i know it's almost like a like you know your like little bits of memory are being dragged through the map to cosmic from your perspective you were having a nice time i was having a great time really it was one of the most beautiful days of my life psychedelics have never been more accessible you don't need to meet a drug dealer in a blacked out car you just need a broom cupboard and a few mushroom spores i arranged to meet this cosmic voyager back at his house to see his diy psilocybin operation it's quite a doorbell matsy baby what up brother come on in man welcome okay you've got a lot of art here would you say psychedelics influenced this art yeah it has a guest yeah i think it's pretty safe to say it's pretty safe to say yeah do you trip a lot in this room generally i like to be outside like my garden you know so you can be looking at like the trees and the sky and stuff through this way bro so i made this bad boy i measured my my to floor height and i purely based on that right and what what's functional little attachments and stuff you know just in case it gets freaky oh man no no no no my plant broke oh no no man down hang on so you go weird as well uh well not not especially we're right in the bee line actually yeah yeah yeah just stand this way oh you mean yeah yeah literally so this is the bee line yeah so this is the way they go in and out of the height what's this shed this looks amazing oh it's a disco shed mate what's going on here oh mate i made captain fisher's turkometer and uh yeah so we made this and it was on like a big uh a big uh circular thing so yeah and there was different levels of twerk so are the shrooms in here oh no mate no no they're inside it's this way bro i'm losing my knickers yeah here we go dude this is my fruiting chamber um it's called a shotgun fruit and chamber because like the holes in it so do you have any that are ready now mushrooms yeah yeah yeah i've been drying them i'll show you yeah yeah these are some that i've been drying out so are these ones you made earlier this was the last flush so i got three flushes out of this one what we got here ban huntai uh then there's mexican dutch cat and there's aussie gold cap and then there's these yotazuri uh these were japanese but it looks like i've eaten all those those are my favorites they didn't last long and where do you get the spores for this rooms uh they're it's all perfectly legal put it together yeah it's deemed illegal and do you make them for selling or for personal use oh no absolutely just for myself mate are you aware of what classification silas ibn is uh yep and does that worry you at all uh it does to a degree um i certainly wouldn't want to get in trouble in it but uh my personal opinion is that it's just something that grows out the ground it's a great trip it's a great drug you know i think it's safer than legal drugs like smoking everyone i had met so far took psychedelics purely recreationally to giggle have a few dance floor epiphanies and potentially remove all their clothes and revert to a primeval state but a growing number of people are using them far more seriously as a form of therapy instead of bitcoin yoga or soul cycle young professionals are going to warehouses in east london on their tuesday evenings and taking psilocybin in front of a group of shamans so we've been invited to one of these ceremonies right now namaste there's 30 40 people in this small warehouse about to engage in this psychedelic ceremony it's very packed it shows you how popular these substances are at least in east london are there any particular issues you were working through i got a lot of stuff in my body that i have to work through not not this lifetime but many many many lifetimes so this is a way for you to kind of exercise your trauma yes and have you ever sought out more traditional types of therapy yes and i always thought that i know more than them this session had been so over subscribed that the organizers had run out of mushrooms the guy that bought the mushrooms has he got more does he have more of them on here does he have more okay great okay cool okay [Music] um so in regards to how it's gonna unfold and what we're gonna do within the ceremony um you have to be careful to be respectful in these and not take them it's not a recreational ceremony you're doing this to sort of surface certain things past trauma childhood trauma relationship stuff but make sure you do set an intention and you'll get a lot more out of the experience when you're ready so today we're going to share with you a beautiful preparation for the medicine that we've just taken it's a uh breathwork was something that was shown to me during a ceremony in costa rica when i was working with the shibibo i was communicating with the medicines i would like everybody to be touching holding hands and they might be crying they might be screaming there might be a whole range of stuff we're opening ourselves up energetically so there's a whole range of things that i've seen and that might happen follow my lead okay so after three a big deep continuous breath in one two three [Music] applying anger and aggression on the way out there's nothing left there's no air left as the breathing became more aggressive and our brains more deprived of oxygen the mushrooms began to kick in this was definitely becoming more midsomar than soul cycle some people in the ceremony began reliving traumatic memories [Applause] hold that breath feel your vibration dude that was insane i my whole body was like vibrating because essentially what we were doing was hyperventilating and now i'm going to do something called graphe which is life up one nostril death up the other hand is an amazonian tribal snuff which is meant to have healing properties during a trip out of my heart into yours all right let's do it [Applause] oh my days oh my goodness yeah that's um that's that that's that's intense that that that'll do it so you obviously had a very intense reaction to the shrooms and the breathing ceremony there's just so much pain and so much pain as you could hear probably yeah that yeah have you had a particularly painful relationship experience with my mom with my dad the love of my life that killed himself oh my god i'm so sorry to hear that 11 months ago and so are you still trying to work through your grief about that yes the grief the pain never stops it when it comes to that yes of course do you find that the ceremony helps you work through that oh yes definitely this is how i go through my process [Music] so i want you to just absorb the vibration of this mantra this is a prayer this is a prayer to the creator and to the liberator there's always something higher protecting us [Music] [Music] i wondered who the shamans in charge of the ceremony were and how they had become qualified to provide dozens of potentially vulnerable people with hallucinogens what makes you guys qualified to do the work that you do i think the most important thing is interesting done yeah variety of courses yeah between us we have got qualifications between us yeah it's nothing that you can really learn because it's something that's already within us what kinds of things do you heal people through all different things wow it's beautiful the way that we can read people now with our instruments where i get a little bit kind of iffy about you know can it be used to heal people is physical diseases like cancer i mean do you say that it can actually heal cancer scientifically proven yeah there's scientifically proven that our instruments um the lady that taught us um she's absolutely amazing her brother's a scientist it's on scientifical and by the time disease manifests in the physical body that's the last stage is your business growing yeah yeah definitely billy would you are you a shaman the word shaman is uh for me bringing consciousness to darkness which i've lived a lot of darkness and i'm now living in the light i've lived a journey of a shaman can you tell me a little about that darkness uh selling drugs by the time i was 12 i was taking steroids sniffing a lot of cocaine there was times where i was cutting myself open a couple of years in prison come home and did you ever seek therapy i did yes i've i've been in free residential rehabilitations and then the opportunity come to go on a a retreat where we was with ayahuasca bufo cambo it gave me more than i could have ever dreamed we could be walking into a future where this is the thing people do to wind down after work there were some real genuine issues being worked through there and a lot of sad stories what i would say is that if i was on shrooms that would be way too intense for me a massive reason so many people have started to use hallucinogens as therapy is because of the heavily publicized work of scientists like dr robin carhart harris he has used these drugs to successfully treat a range of mental health issues what i wanted to know though was what he thought about untrained people replicating that treatment outside of a clinical setting is there a scientific basis for using psychedelics to benefit yourself or treat yourself there's a growing evidence base that psychedelics used in a particular way can improve mental health outcomes both from observational research or when we do our studies clinical trials that indicate that if used in a particular way and that's so important psychedelics can have beneficial effects for mental health pseudo-scientific new agey stuff really worries me especially in this day and age where spirituality and religion is so depleted generally people are looking for it you know they're kind of searching for it we've all heard like anecdotal stories about people who have had a bad trip and sort of had a permanent psychosis the risk of having enduring psychosis from taking psychedelics is far higher in a recreational context because in a research context or a therapeutic context these people would be screened out and you would control the environment so that things can't so easily go wrong and if they do go wrong you'll have the support to get you through those experiences and try and learn from them one of people's biggest fears that stops them from taking psychedelics is this idea that what if i take them once and never stop tripping and go permanently crazy it turns out there is actually something called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder or hppd which means that someone takes psychedelics either once or several times and then some of the effects of that seem to linger for anywhere up to a week to some months to indefinitely i went to a festival to sell some acid and ended up spilling a bottle on myself so you absorbed it through your skin and i drank quite a bit of it so how much acid and total do you think you took about 40 drips so 4 000 like 40 times the hourly times the average dose i was literally tripping eight or nine months after the incident visually to the point where it was difficult to do things i'm seeing fractals visual snow exactly like an old school telly with just the black and white fuzz and that covers your entire vision and are you seeing that right now yeah you don't feel like you're on drugs but everything looks like you're on drugs right so just the visual effects of the psychedelics have lasted yeah since utah it's been four years now what effect did that have on your social life your family life your relationships if i didn't speak to my friends i didn't speak to my family i couldn't tell anyone about it i didn't seek help from the doctor i was too scared i thought i was just going to get section devoted to the doctors given how terrible your experience was do you think that psychedelics should remain a class a drug purely because of the damage they can do to people yes i feel everyone should be warned and fully understand the dangers and it's not just a game as much as i thought it was it's not it's really not your mental state isn't something you should just play with willy-nilly it's not something that should be molded and changed it's serious [Applause] [Music] it seems that the rapidly growing number of young people struggling with mental and spiritual ailments are fed up with pharmaceuticals and searching for a deeper cure it's clear that we can't stop them from taking these substances but if the government relax regulations on research perhaps we could get to a place faster where hallucinogens are available in a safer setting as for the people using them purely for fun this is the uk if there's a way of getting spannered people will do it you ain't nothing but a hurdle he's got [Music] make a big space

Channel: VICE

Views: 4,370,371

Keywords: drugs, vice, journalism, documentary, videos, culture, interview, film, movies, underground, vice videos, lifestyle, independent, vice guide, exclusive, vice mag, vice magazine, vice.com, world, documentaries, short films, docs, yt:cc=on, PSYCHEDELICS, LSD, MAGIC MUSHROOMS, SHROOMS, Psilocybin, HPPD, magic mushroom ceremony, MENTAL HEALTH, psychedelic renaissance, TRIPPING, ACID, hallucinogens, COSMIC, Shaman

Id: Lld8KpTW8RA

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/PsycheSoldier]

“High Society” sounds like a True dystopian culture.

[u/gripmyhand]

Is this a different 'society'? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEejCTrOMIk

[u/gripmyhand]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIVIfQaqVG4

[u/gripmyhand]

https://youtu.be/m4dV2NmbbAI