"Combined with quality therapy, safe and equitable access, and full-scale societal healing, psychedelics are a shortcut to liberation, dignity, and power—the 'Promised Land' as envisioned by Martin Luther King, Jr.," writes Dr. Nicholas Powers, poet, journalist, and English professor at SUNY Old Westbury.
Powers is the author of a new book—Black Psychedelic Revolution—an exploration of why Western psychedelic culture is so white even though Black and Indigenous people have such a rich history of psychedelic medicine and ritual dating back thousands of years. Indeed, hallucinogens such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, and iboga are rooted in the native traditions of Mexico, South America, and Africa.
From a description of Powers's book:
In Black Psychedelic Revolution, Dr. Nicholas Powers charts how psychedelics can heal racial pain passed on through generations. He shows how this medicine unlocks a return to one's self, facilitating an embodied experience of safety, peace, and being-here-now otherwise disrupted by whiteness—and he explores how psychedelics can catalyze individual wellness even as they transcend it. Drugs taken with therapy can heal. But drugs taken with a social movement can heal a nation.
Powers unpacks how the Drug War, racist policing, mass incarceration, and community gatekeeping intersect to sideline POC—specifically Black people—from the psychedelic movement. He asserts the need for a full-stop reclamation and revolution: one that eschews psychedelic exceptionalism, breaks down raced and classed constructs of "good" vs. "bad" drugs, realizes healing, and lives into a free, strong, and independent Blackness.
Jane C. Hu interviewed Powers for The Microdose. When asked to imagine a "better" future that psychedelics could help manifest, this was his response:
I would like for psychedelics to be woven into our culture on two levels: a medical model level, and then also the spiritual and philosophical level — psychedelics being used not only for therapy, but to cure the sickness in the heart of man. I'd like us to accept that nature has shaped us all, and blessed and cursed us with an incredible ability to have empathy and imagination, but also an incredible ability to be violent. That's just who we are, and maybe by accepting that we are the dominant species on the planet, we're coming to a turning point where the narcissism of small differences that can erupt into war is something we can't afford any more, because our technology has gotten to the place where it could lead to the destruction of life. I think it's interesting that LSD and the atomic bomb were both basically created a few years apart — that humanity acquired these two amazing, powerful tools. The fact that psychedelics are still illegal while we have tens of thousands of nuclear missiles across the world just seems like an incredible failure.
The use of psychedelics for healing can also be expanded. Psychedelics have been used with soldiers who have seen violence, and I think that could be extended to children, teens, and young adults who have dealt with gang violence and homicide. They're similar forms of violence. And apart from immediate physical violence, there's a lot of stress that comes from poverty, like housing and food insecurity, that are forms of trauma people from poor and working classes experience and need to deal with, even if later generations are more upwardly mobile. Psychedelics are just one way to free oneself from these invisible chains we're dragging around, to realize that all of us, in some way, have suppressed parts of ourselves and integrated those parts into our subconscious. The psychedelic version of Martin Luther King Jr's dream, to follow the logic of integration, is to integrate not only the outcast but also the stranger inside of ourselves.
Previously:
• Ancient psychedelic wisdom for modern medicine
• Netflix's 4-part adaptation of Michael Pollan's book on psychedelics, 'How to Change Your Mind'
• A magician-psychologist designed a study to trick sober participants into thinking they were tripping on psychedelics
• Psychedelics are 'anti-distressants'with benefits beyond treating depression