Director Tyler Chandler
Rated M
Score 5.5/6

After years of prescription medications failed her a suicidal woman, Adrianne, turns to underground healers to try and overcome her depression, anxiety, and opioid addiction with illegal psychedelic medicine like magic mushrooms and iboga.

Compared to the other documentaries I have reviewed Dosed certainly is an out of left field choice for a documentary for me to review.
I haven’t come across any of Tyler Chandler’s work before, the best I can tell Dosed is the first documentary that he has directed, though he has been involved with the production of a handful of other documentaries. It was a brilliant move to drop the audience into the deep end with a graphic with statistics from the World Health Organization about the number of people who suffer from Anxiety, depression and addiction. The number of deaths from the opioid and fentanyl crisis. Though I suppose the confronting of the statistics was the 127 suicides that according to graphic took place while I watched the movie. I also found that some of the discussion in Dosed about the use of illegal substances as a mechanism to deal with feeling rang true with me (for the record I choose substances that are slightly more legal substances such as hamburgers. For those of you wondering yes, my Mother has been known to read my reviews on occasion).
One of the most interesting sequences in the documentary was the affect the iboga had on Adrianne. Sitting here writing my review I can only describe the affect iboga as being what I assume your iPhone or iPad goes through when you update its software. Given the serious subject matter of Dosed I have to admit that my favourite moment of the movie was a little more light hearted. It was comment made by the filmmakers about driving around filming while there is a quantity of psychedelic mushrooms in the car.

What I thought was the biggest missed opportunity for Dosed by the filmmakers was that some of the people featured in the documentary such as Rick Doblin the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and Rosalind Watts from the Imperial College London should have been interviewed by Adrianne. It would have also been good to learn more about the medical study that they referenced. I’ll speculate the reason the filmmakers only used anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of iboga could readily be put down to its illegality. A major reason to change the attitude towards the use of psychedelic medicine and its illegality when treating depression, anxiety and addressing the opioid and fentanyl crisis is the 127 suicides that happened while I watched Dosed.

For those of you interested in watching apparently there are several Q & A Screenings planed about Australia in March. All screenings are endorsed by Mind Medicine Australia and the Australian Psychedelic Society and I am told there are plans for more screenings in April and May.
• WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL 27 March
• Dendy Newtown (Sydney) March 10th
• Dendy Coorparoo (Brisbane) Mar 10th
• New Farm cinemas (Brisbane) Mar 19th