Nine Perfect Strangers lets us take a walk on the wild side without leaving our sofas

Namely, I’m emulating the guests’ experience in hit drama Nine Perfect Strangers, which recently returned to Amazon Prime Video.

The second season sees the action move from California to the Austrian Alps, but the premise remains the same: nine people arrive at a swanky retreat seeking balm for their aching souls from their bucolic surroundings, if not the hallucinogenic drugs being secretly served up by Nicole Kidman’s Russian guru, Masha.

Ever since author Aldous Huxley detailed his own psychedelic trip in The Doors of Perception in 1954, similar experiences have been explored on screen. Away from the comic delights of Margo and Jerry’s accidental imbibing of Tom’s homebrew in The Good Life, though, it has seldom signalled a good thing in drama.

Long before Mad Men’s Don Draper escaped from his shattered identity via laughing gas, and Diane Lockhart in The Good Fight fled American politics via regular microdosing, “LSD trip” became a narrative shorthand for those desperate to outrun bad things, only to find even worse things awaiting them on the other side of those doors.

And yet here I am, snoozing on a yoga mat, ready to receive sound and video to replicate such a trip (but without the drugs). I’m fed soft music through headphones, while the images are those of a moving spirograph. My revelation? I’m strangely rested, but… “So much purple!” I shout, and our guru beams. “We were only giving you white light,” he says. OK, so that means I’m highly suggestible, but is this a good thing?

Time to crack open the nut or, to be more specific, Professor David Nutt, longtime champion of psychedelics, who gives me a potted history of LSD and its hallucinogenic cousins, and calls the banning of its research and application in the 1970s the worst act of clinical censorship in history. “There is no treatment that could have helped humanity as much.”

Nutt is something of a controversial figure, sacked from his government advisory role in 2009 for saying that LSD was ten times less harmful than alcohol. Today he cites its potential use in treating addiction, and tells me: “I got it wrong. It’s 100 times less harmful.”

While he agrees the secret dosing in Nine Perfect Strangers is completely unethical, Nutt says a show like this wouldn’t have been made a decade ago and is delighted to see drugs like psilocybin (the key component of magic mushrooms) up front and centre: “It demystifies them. People take them and they don’t die, which is always a good start.”

Who’s the greatest real-life advert? Nutt says a lot of very successful, creative people secretly ingest, such as the late Steve Jobs. “LSD brought him the vision of a computer that people saw as art,” says Nutt. At the other end of the scale, there’s cult founder and murderer Charles Manson. Nutt’s verdict? “He killed some people, but he might have done that anyway.”

Hmm, and as my pal always says, “What’s good for society might be really bad for me.” Fortunately, with shows like Nine Perfect Strangers, we get to take a little walk on the wild side without leaving our sofas. Aside from your reporter, who must confirm feeling a little queasy afterwards, but we’ll never know if that was the quasi-psychedelic trip or the eight-course meal.

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