The Acid House

Three twisted tales of abuse, drugs, displaced personalities, and insect life by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh.

Number One (1973)

"Number One" (1973) is an Italian crime-thriller film directed by Gianni Buffardi. It stars Renzo Montagnani, Luigi Pistilli, and Claude Jade, and it's loosely based on a real-life story about crime and drugs in the Rome underground. The film explores the dark underbelly of Rome in the early 1970s, revealing drug use, crime, and sexual scandals. Click on the image for the full film.

The Nature of Ayahuasca (2019)

Ayahausca is a traditional plant medicine from the Amazon used to treat a variety of physical and psychology illnesses and conditions. This film explores the use of the Ayahausca as a holistic medicine, challenging stigmas around its use and helping people become more conscious and ethical consumers of the plant if that's the path they choose.

Weed (1972)

 

Documentary about the prevalence and popularity of marijuana in the early 1970's. Featuring interviews with customs agents, a drug dealer, a law professor, and marijuana smokers, such subjects as the growing, smuggling, smoking, selling, and legalization of marijuana are all addressed. Moreover, the filmmakers take us on a tour around the world to various places that include Mexico, Canada, Cambodia, Nepal, and Saigon, Vietnam in order to show the ubiquity and availability of marijuana all over the globe. 

For the first couple years of his feature filmmaking career, X-rated auteur Alex de Renzy focused almost entirely on directing documentaries. His distinct style of cinéma vérité crossed with informal interviews resulted in a unique series of films exploring world cultures, as seen through underground and transgressive sex and drug lifestyles. 

This ambitious examination of marijuana takes deRenzy on an international journey as he meets dealers, users, and the various lawmen out to stop them. A sometimes funny, sometimes unsettling, but constantly engrossing examination of the then burgeoning "war on drugs".

Yagé is Our Life - Documentary

Yagé is Our Life is a documentary film captured in the Putumayo region of Colombia. For centuries the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon have been using yagé (sometimes known as ayahuasca) for the health, social cohesion and spiritual guidance of their communities. Yagé is rich in the potent psychedelic substance DMT and for these indigenous groups it is sacred, allowing them access to ancient wisdom and the spirits of nature. In their ceremonies, the taitas or traditional doctors use yagé to treat their patients for physical and emotional illnesses and as a guide for making decisions.


The communities are now facing many new threats to their traditional way of life. Primarily, the commercialisation of their yagé medicine and foreign pressures exerted on their homelands by industrialised civilisation. This film gives indigenous leaders from the region a platform to discuss these issues and the importance of yagé as a living tradition in their communities.


Winner of the 'Best International Short Film' at the Respect Human Rights Film Festival, Belfast, 2017.

Four Corners - The Ice Age Documentary (2006)

Sydney, Australia in the early 2000s and the streets are awash with Ice or methamphetamine. Many thousands of people are taking it, some losing everything to it. Many lose a lot. It is an unforgiving substance that can destroy you while you feel like you are on top of the world, as long as the supply continues. As you gradually destroy your mental and physical health.

"One Step Beyond": The Sacred Mushroom

In this rather amazing episode, Newland travels to Mexico to eat magic mushrooms. This show aired less than a year after Timothy Leary had traveled to Cuernavaca and had his first experiences with psilocybin, making Newland, along with Leary, one of the handful of high profile pioneers of psychedelia and one of the first public figures to praise psilocybin’s mind expanding properties.

The Vipers (1955)

Director: Shinkichi Tajiri |
Production Country: The Netherlands |
Year: 1955 |
Production Company: Unknown |
Film from the collection of EYE (Amsterdam) - www.eyefilm.nl

"The ritual of people who come together, make a joint, smoke it, become high and have fantasies. Tajiri and his wife Ferdi figure in the film together with Hy Hirsch (an American abstract artist) and his wife. The film also contains "found footage" from movie journals. The film got a lot of attention at the time."

"I wanted to make a short documentary-style film about marijuana and hashish, psychoactive drugs that in 1955 were still relatively unknown to the general public. They were mainly used by a small group of artists, jazz musicians, intellectuals, and North Africans."

"I wanted to visualize the ritual of rolling and lighting up a joint, and then put a series of seemingly unrelated images next to each other to represent the feeling of being high. When the movie was finished, we took it to the festival for 16mm films at Cannes, and won the Golden Lion for ‘Best Use of Film Language." (Shinkichi Tajiri, Tajiri, 1993)

Beyond Life with Timothy Leary (full documentary)

Timothy Leary: The Man Who Turned On America is a 2001 British television documentary (from the BBC's Reputations series) examining the life, career, and complex legacy of the 1960s counterculture icon.

Breaking the Taboo

Breaking the Taboo: The Truth About the War on Drugs is a 2015 Brazilian documentary on the War on Drugs (1971-) in which countless lives have been lost or destroyed at a cost of billions of dollars. This film is narrated by Morgan Freeman and is a harrowing account of how drugs policy is enacted on the ground around the world. From the slums of Baltimore to the mountains of Afghanistan a violent campaign is being waged against the production, distribution and consumption of illegal narcotics. But when viewed in light of human rights and harm minimization the cost of the War on Drugs can be argued to outstrip the cost of addiction and health problems from taking drugs.

The film also had repercussions in the English newspaper The Guardian: "The documentary highlights the perils of debating an issue so clouded by ideology and calls for an end to the stigmatization of the debate. It boasts the support of several former world leaders including Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter."

"The War on Drugs has failed. After 50 years of prohibition, illicit drugs are now the third most valuable industry in the world after food and oil, all in the control of criminals. Drugs are cheaper and more available than ever before. Millions of people are in prison for drugs offences. Corruption and violence, especially in producer and transit countries, endangers democracy. Tens of thousands of people die each year in drug wars."

METH

This is an intense and brilliant documentary about the seductive horror that is crystal methamphetamine use, told from the perspective of American gay men. This is a drug that will take your life to pieces, set it on fire and then flush the remains down the toilet,  all the while you are believing you are king/queen of the world. That is until you are a twitching, emaciated, jabbering, paranoid, bleeding, homeless, messed-up slave or dead.

METH explores the rising wave of crystal methamphetamine use within the gay population. Through the reflections of a dozen gay men, we learn of the drug's allure, its promise, and why its popularity is soaring. Some of the men in the film are current users, and they share their life with us while under the constant influence of "Tina." Other interviewees are former denizens of "Tina World," who have managed to crawl back from the depths to which their addictions brought them. Throughout, METH is an unflinching look at the devastating effects of addiction to this very serious drug.

Click on the image above to go to Hell. 

The Man With the Golden Arm

The Man with the Golden Arm is a 1955 American drama film, based on the novel of the same name by Nelson Algren, which tells the story of a heroin addict who gets clean while in prison, but struggles to stay that way in the outside world. It stars Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak, Arnold Stang and Darren McGavin. It was adapted for the screen by Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer and Ben Hecht (uncredited), and directed by Otto Preminger

When Otto Preminger was willing to release his drug-addiction drama Man With the Golden Arm without the sanction of a Production Code seal, it proved to be yet another nail in the coffin of that censorial dinosaur. Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, expert card dealer. Recently released from prison, Frankie is determined to set his life in order -- and that means divesting himself of his drug habit. He dreams of becoming a jazz drummer, but his greedy wife Eleanor Parker wants him to continue his lucrative gambling activities. Since Parker is confined to a wheelchair as a result of a car accident caused by Frankie, he's in no position to refuse. Only the audience knows that Parker is not crippled, but is faking her invalid status to keep Frankie under her thumb. Gambling boss Robert Strauss wants Frankie to deal at a high-stakes poker game; terrified that he's lost his touch, Frankie asks dope pusher Darren McGavin to supply him with narcotics. When McGavin discovers that Parker is not an invalid, she kills him, and Frankie (who is elsewhere at the time) is accused of the murder. He is willing to go to the cops, but he doesn't want to show up with drugs in his system. So with the help of sympathetic B-girl Kim Novak, Sinatra locks himself up and goes "cold turkey"-a still-harrowing sequence, despite the glut of "doper" films that followed in the wake of this picture. After Parker herself is killed in a suicidal fall, the path is cleared for Frankie to pursue a clean new life with Novak.

Reefer Madness (1936)

Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children) is a 1936 exploitation film revolving around the tragic events that ensue when high school students are lured by pushers to try "marihuana": a hit and run accident, manslaughter, suicide, rape, and descent into madness all ensue. The film was directed by Louis Gasnier and starred a cast composed of mostly unknown bit actors. It was originally financed by a church group and made under the title Tell Your Children.

The film was intended to be shown to parents as a morality tale attempting to teach them about the dangers of cannabis use. However, soon after the film was shot, it was purchased by producer Dwain Esper, who re-cut the film for distribution on the exploitation film circuit. The film never gained an audience until it was rediscovered in the 1970s and gained new life as a piece of unintentional comedy among cannabis smokers. Today, it is in the public domain in the United States and is considered a cult film. It inspired a musical satire, which premiered off-Broadway in 2001, and a Showtime film, Reefer Madness, based on the musical.