What is the connection between physical and mental health? Is your brain the most important consideration, or is it your mind? How much influence does that past have on the present, and what part of that is most useful in creating the future?
Director Jordan Kronick’s new documentary takes on the questions surrounding using psychedelics to treat trauma in a multi-faceted and intimate focus. Peaking: Psychedelics and the Pursuit of Happiness is a film that opens up questions about healing and nature. The film makers explore all the major psychedelics, not just by explaining how they work medicinally, but by showing it.
The film illustrates medical uses of psychedelics across five settings: former athletes with persistent post-concussive symptoms in Oregon’s regulated psilocybin program, veterans and PTSD with ayahuasca in the Amazon, survivors of the Nova Music Festival attack, opioid addiction and ibogaine treatment in Mexico, and loneliness in the California desert.
Peaking also traces the turbulent history of how psychedelics were criminalized in the 1960s and how, ever since, they’ve been moving from the underground to the mainstream in a rise that might soon lead to their legalization in the United States and beyond.
The documentary is in limited release, and will be screening from Oct. 2 through Oct. 8 at the Laemmle Theaters in Santa Monica. For tickets: https://tickets.laemmle.com/seats/00001-00001-00003/93608/2630
