With psychedelics becoming more mainstream, many celebrities have opened up about their experiences with psychoactive drugs. Streaming services like Netflix have released documentaries such as Have a Good Trip and The Mind Explained helping to de-stigmatize psychedelics. Scroll to read about these celebrities and their out-of-body experiences.
Miley Cyrus
Miley Cyrus has been very open about her use of various psychedelics, but in an interview with Rolling Stone she shared that Ayahuasca was one of her favorite drugs she’s ever done. Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew that is traditionally used in spiritual ceremonies among the indigenous communities of South America. Ayahuasca is brewed into a tea, typically made by a trained Shaman, and contains DMT which can cause out-of-body experiences, heavy visuals, and euphoria. Cyrus’s ayahuasca ceremony took place at her home with a shaman, psychedelic rock band The Flaming Lips, and a few other friends in 2015. In an interview that same year, she told the New York Times, “I think ayahuasca is a healing thing. […] I loved what it did for me.” She explained on the Joe Rogan Experience, that it “unlocked something,” and even changed her relationship with mood-altering substances stating, “Since then I haven’t loved getting high as much as I used to.” On a creative level, the experience has even led Cyrus and The Flaming Lips to collaborate and tour together. In fact, the band’s lead singer Wayne Coyne inspired the psychedelic sound of Cyrus’s 2015 album, Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz.
Will Smith
Will Smith revealed to David Letterman in an episode of My Next Guess Needs No Introduction that he took 14 “journeys” on ayahuasca in Peru over the course of two years. In the episode, which was filmed prior to the infamous Oscars slap, Smith recalls a vision he had during one trip, “I started seeing all of my money flying away, and my house is flying away, and my career is going away, and I’m trying to grab for my money, and my career and my whole life is getting destroyed.” Smith called it “the individual most hellish psychological experience.” Although a frightening experience, Smith had some major takeaways including, “99 percent of the s— you worry about never happens. Ninety-nine percent of your pain and your misery is all self-generated; it’s not real.” It also gave him the realization that he can handle anything that life throws his way.
Seth Rogan
Seth Rogan has had many experiences with Psilocybin mushrooms (commonly known as “magic mushrooms”) over the years. His psychedelic journey began at a young age and in an interview with Vulture, he shared, “Man, I did a lot of shrooms when I was like 13 and 14 years old — dozens of times at a formative age. It’s a real consciousness-expanding drug, so maybe it’s had pretty deep effects.” He’s also told Jimmy Kimmel about the time when eating mushrooms in Amsterdam led to him going on a trip to Paris. Although a highly comical shroom story, the substance has also provided Rogan with some profound revelations. He explained, “Shrooms are a very insightful drug — very introspective. I did shrooms recently and then quit a job the next day. So yeah, I’ve made some real-life decisions as a result.”
Kacey Musgraves
Following a heart-wrenching divorce, Kacey Musgraves went reaching for psychedelic mushrooms which was not the first time that the hit-song writer turned to psychedelics for therapy. However, In February 2021, Musgraves had a ‘Life-Changing’ psilocybin trip that helped her transform her trauma into a new album.
The trip was guided and timed to a seven-hour-and-40-minute playlist developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins. She told Rolling Stone, “It was like mental and spiritual labor. Like, 10 years of therapy in one sitting” which was the very purpose of the playlist designed by John Hopkins. She explains “The idea is learning how to kill your ego,” for “The ego wants control. The ego can misinform you, as a person, your outlook and your inward feelings toward yourself.… The idea is you can embrace your shadow self and your shadow emotions, almost as if it’s a character that needs love as well.” In an interview with Apple Music, she explained how psychedelics helped her turn heartbreak into art, “…it was completely life-changing in so many ways, but it also triggered this whole big bang of not only the album title but the song Star-Crossed and the concept, you know, me looking into the structure of tragedies themselves as an art form throughout time.”
Mike Tyson
Mike Tyson told the New York Post in 2021 that he “died” during his first time tripping on psychedelic toad venom. The “toad,” commonly known as the Sonoran Desert Toad, obtains venom that can be smoked to produce a short psychoactive trip. He explained in the interview, “Before I did the toad, I was a wreck. The toughest opponent I ever faced was myself. I had low self-esteem. People with big egos often have low self-esteem. We use our ego to subsidize that. The toad strips the ego.” Tyson first tried it as a dare but has since tripped over 50 times. He’s become so into the trippy toad that he even has a nursery of the amphibians located at his ranch in Desert Hot Springs, California. Through this transformation, Tyson said, “People see the difference [in me],” and that “It speaks for itself. If you knew me in 1989 you knew a different person. My mind isn’t sophisticated enough to fathom what happened, but life has improved. The toad’s whole purpose is to reach your highest potential. I look at the world differently. We’re all the same. Everything is love.”
Chance the Rapper
Chance the Rapper spoke with HipHopDX’s Dan Rys in 2013 about how he began using acid. Like many artists who have used LSD to make music and towards the end of 2012, Chance started doing acid and recording in the studio. He explained, “It’s less of a mind-altering drug to me…it just frees you and allows you to think outside of what you would normally write about or listen to or how you would evaluate a song that you were making.” He also mentioned that is not as easy to rap while on the substance but, “I have ADD, so I’m all over the place anyway. But it was a great experience because it was at a time where I was going through so many changes in life. Shit was moving so fast for me, and I wanted to just not be worried about anything. It kind of just like opened up my mind and allowed me to think deeper about stuff, but also to not be as confined to one way of thinking. In fact, he told MTV that “30 to 40 percent” of his album, ‘Acid Rap’ was done on LSD.
