Black Psychedelic Revolution: Coming to a Community Near You
Psychedelic drugs are commonly associated with the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s and LSD guru Timothy Leary’s call to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” But in the past decade, psychedelics like MDMA, magic mushrooms and LSD have gained a new following after being successfully used to heal Iraq and Afghanistan War vets suffering from PTSD. In his latest book, The Black Psychedelic Revolution: From Trauma to Revolution, The Indypendent’s Nicholas Powers imagines a time in the near future when psychedelics are used by New York’s working class and poor to heal from long-standing trauma and get free. Below is an excerpt from the book.
Powers will also be joining us in the second half of this Tuesday’s Indypendent News Hour, which airs 5–6 p.m. on WBAI-99.5 FM and streams on wbai.org.
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Black Psychedelic Revolution: Healing the Hood
By Nicholas Powers
Chris Rock and Will Smith cut a red ribbon tied to a freshly painted building. The awning says The People’s Psychedelic Therapy Center. Camera flashes create a strobe-light effect.
Rock gestures to the staff. “Thanks to the Mental Health Infrastructure Act of 2029.” He points at the building. “Who knew that MDMA can heal the hood?”
Smith ties an arm around Rock. “Millions saw Chris and I undergo our psychedelic healing in the HBO special ‘The Slap Heard Round the World.’ If we can do it, you can do it!”
Rock leans in.
“I thought Will was on ayahuasca when he hit me.” He side-eyes Smith. “When he said let’s do LSD, I was like, haven’t you done enough drugs? I still can’t hear out this ear.” The staff giggles. “We’re friends again. Who knows where a punch can land?”
Rock play-jabs Smith and accidentally hits his chin. Smith’s head snaps. He blinks tears.
“You okay?” Rock theatrically squints. Smith raises his palms up.
“Waited years for that,” Rock says.
***
Dr. Iwosan strides down the hall, heels like a clock’s tic-toc. She peeks into the rooms and sees a therapist spray lavender mist on a cornrowed Black man on MDMA. He smiles. In another room, a therapist cradles a weeping Dominican boy. Iwosan leans on the door. Good. Good. Release that shit.
Sitting in the office is a tight-lipped young sistah. Baby-faced and tense, she obsessively scrolls her cell phone.
“Keisha.”
No response. Stone.
Iwosan leans back on her desk, pulls her dreadlocks back and sighs. She read the girl’s file — 13 years old; brother shot dead nine months ago; gang related — classic PTSD symptoms. Lil’ Iron Chef here just razor-slashed a girl at school. It’s either this or juvie.
“Keisha, do you want to be here?”
“Sure.” A Megan Thee Stallion video reflects from the cell phone onto her pupils. “Free drugs.”
Iwosan sidesteps Keisha and opens the door.
“Yo, you kickin’ me out?” Keisha snarled. Iwosan lifts her shirt to reveal a dark scar. “At 14, I was shot.” She shakes her head. “I survived the bullet but died in here.” She taps her heart. “Did drugs. Did the streets. Did every mistake you are about to. Come back when you want help.”
Keisha sucks her teeth and leaves.
***
Across America, psychedelic healing centers open in ghettos, barrios and trailer parks. Old buildings are cleaned, painted white and a sunrise logo is put on the doors. Staff hand leaflets in groceries, knock on paint-blistered doors. People trickle into the centers. Nurses lead them to large rooms with soft mats, soft music and incense. A doctor tells them step by step what a psychedelic trip is and how it works. Along with treatment, they will get housing and food vouchers.
After the trip, a patient may lay in a field of flowers, staring at clouds. Worried friends and family gently touch their shoulders. Are they okay? Turning to the bewildered, the patient asks for forgiveness and also gives it. Staring at the sky, they feel connected to something larger.
Patients leave the psychedelic healing center as bright as lightbulbs. When they laugh, it shakes off fear like laundry snapped in the sun. A few leave their families to create a new self in the horizon. Some ask why so much hurt was visited on them. How did they get used to poverty, stigma and oppression?
Behind the buzz, doctors research patients’ records. They sit red-eyed at the desk, slurping cold coffee, reading charts and prepping sessions. Curating music. Analyzing family dynamics. Cataloging key images and themes from prior sessions. Some reread Jacques Lacan, Patricia Clark, William E. Cross or Melanie Klein.
Outside the centers, reporters hold microphones in front of patients like wands. The Fox News journalists hope to catch a looney patient to prove that psychedelics are a fool’s errand at best, poison at worst. Surprise, always surprise, at a serene human being deepened by an inner journey. Patting their chests, they say they feel like themselves; for the first time in their whole lives, they feel at home in their bodies. They stopped the meth, stopped the drinking, stopped the meanness. Smiling like a baby, many repeating the word “reborn.”
***
At home, Dr. Iwosan plays a video interview of Rick Doblin, a pioneer founder of psychedelic therapy. “He was a veteran … disabled with PTSD for years. Friends of his had been killed in Iraq.” Doblin opens his hands like an origami bird. “Under MDMA, he had this realization about PTSD. It was the way he showed loyalty to his friends who had died.” He points at the table. “Suffering was a way to be bonded with them. But seeing himself from the eyes of his friends who had died, he realized they wouldn’t want him to squander his life.” Doblin raises a hand, as if gesturing to the afterlife. “They didn’t have life anymore. They would want him to live as fully as possible, and he realized there was another way to honor his friends, which is to live. And in that moment, he cured himself of PTSD.”
Iwosan pauses the video and remembers Kiesha clutching her cellphone, muscles taut as ropes, knotting herself around the memory of her brother. She loves him. She loves him and can’t let go.
I got you, Keisha.
***
Days later, Iwosan guides Keisha to sit in the La-Z-Boy and asks about her brother. She turns each word carefully, like a burglar at a bank vault. Keisha soon stops talking to Iwosan and is in a full blown conversation with her brother. “Why didn’t you stop fucking around with that crew? Why do you never listen? Why didn’t you love us more than the street?”
Iwosan knows transference has begun. Keisha aims her words in a wobbly way from Iwosan to her brother. It’s like watching a player at Luna Park in Coney Island holding a water gun, trying to hit the zombie face across the booth. She has something to say to her brother, and now is the time.
After a break, Keisha lies on the floor cushion.
“Ready?” Iwosan asks.
“Ready,” Keisha nods.
Iwosan injects her with ketamine. The girl clutches her brother’s balled-up T-shirt. The nurse spritzes lavender mist. Deep emotions wash over Keisha like tides erasing a sand sculpture. She is tossed on a big feeling, dashed against grief. At the peak, she feels a hand lift her. It’s Kay, her brother. He is giant-sized. She hugs him, punches and curses him. He takes it all. He tells her, “Live, I want you to do what I can’t. Live.”
Blinking back tears, Keisha looks up.
“I saw him… ” An exhausted smile spreads. “I saw him.”
“He was looking for you.” Iwosan strokes her sweaty forehead.
Later, Keisha gets on the A train. Turned inside out. I’ve been turned inside out. Eyes shut, she sees Kay. He is a pearl clamped by a shell, plucked out and freed.
***
The staff is transfixed by the TV. Dr. Iwosan rushes in and looks at the screen. Republican Ron DeSantis yells, “Psychedelic treatment centers brainwash people with critical race theory. Shut them down!”
Phones ring at the desk. Emails beep on computers. Clients stumble from rooms into the hallway, take off sleeping masks, and stare, confused.
The next day, Fox News chases staff with microphones as a doctor dashes into a car. Republicans call for the closure of the treatment centers and a recriminalization of psychedelics.
Across America, psychedelic therapy is demonized. At bars, boorish men yell over drinks that treatment centers poisoned America. At laundry mats, conservative newspapers make false stories of suicides front-page news., aAnd run cartoons of communists pouring smoking test tubes of strange concoctions down people’s throats.
By the end of the month, treatment directors hold a Zoom meeting. During it, they despaired at decades of retelling the story of psychedelics, wasted. Twiddling eyeglasses, one man said maybe they should temporarily shut down. A silence followed. It stank of fear.
No.
Dr. Iwosan, dressed in a business suit and cowrie shells, dreadlocks in a bun — says no. She tells them about a girl whose brother was shot. She had PTSD. After ketamine therapy, she finished school. “Are we going to take away her chance at a good life because racists lie about who we are?”
***
Life.
Keisha leans on the windowsill and feels the summer sun. Her brown face is like a sunflower, soaking in light.
Life.
In her hand, sweat glitters like gold dust. Smiling, she turns to the mirror and pulls on the shirt with Bob Marley’s Exodus album cover on the front. Next, Pan-African wristbands, ointment on the new tattoo of a lion and a pinky finger smoothing fresh cornrows. Total dap.
She sees Black beauty everywhere. Seeing Black. Tasting Black. Loving Black. The psychedelic trip, the books, the Malcolm X YouTube clips, the political chat rooms. Yeah, some of it flies over her head, but it adds to the change that was a long time coming, a re-centering of herself in what she actually wanted — pride in her body and its history.
On her way to a meeting, Keisha strides past drunks. Before they licked her with their eyes. Now they raise bottles in salute. “All right now.” One wipes his mouth. “She a queen, now.”
She stops, breathes and turns. “We all royalty.”
“Not all.” He takes a large swig of rum.
“Who taught you that?” She puts one foot on the step. “Who taught you to be less than what you are?” The words pierce the liquor haze. “I did the psychedelic treatment. Lots of friends got clean after the sessions. Check ’em out. If you are on Medicare, it’s free.”
“You grown.” He puts the bottle down.
“Growing.” She stands up and looks down the street. “Growing.”
***
An ominous silence thickens the air. Dr. Iwosan drives to the Psychedelic Therapy Center. On building stoops, huddling over cellphones, Black folks murmured. The combinations don’t make sense. Church ladies sit with drunks, MTA drivers with Hoteps, gay couples with hustlers. The same shadow passes across their faces.
She walks to one crew. A man grinds a fist into his palm. “Motherfuckers.” An off-duty security guard shushes him. On the screen, Sen. Cory Booker says, “Today’s Supreme Court decision overturned Brown v. Board of Education and the Voting Rights Act. We as a nation are in shock.”
Iwosan’s heart kicks, and a dizzy spell makes her sit.
What? What. What. How? Why?
***
The street is a held breath. Air is sucked backward and up. Nothing left to say. Nothing left to think.
Rage rises. New York sits on top of a volcano. The hairs on arms stand up. Scared people dash indoors.
Iwosan grips the windowsill and hears yelling in the street. Glass shatters. Gunshots echo. She feels the rage. It spins thought into a black hole that penetrates time itself. Ancient memory kicks inside her body. Countless enslaved ancestors crawl up her throat. No. No. No. Life is not worth living in a living death.
She runs down the stairs, the street and into a moving river of people. Black families in doorways pour into the movement. Flames twist from a police van; they are bright red and crackle in the eerie silence. On every face, the fire is reflected in thousands of eyes so it looks as if innumerable ignited torches are falling on the city.
“Exodus now!” Around her, fists thrust into the air. One has the a lion tattooed on forearm. Iwosan sees Keisha and zigzags to her. The young woman smiles, holds out a finger with a tab of LSD on it.
“Your turn, doctor.”
Iwosan tongues the tab.
“We’re not going back,” Keisha says. “Healing showed me the cause of our pain was thinking this could ever be home.” She makes a sweeping gesture to America. “Its heart has hardened. It will not let us go. Tonight, we are the pillar of fire. Tonight, we kill the pharaoh.” She hugs Iwosan and moves deep into the march, gone.
Iwosan feels the end coming. All the weight she bore upon her shoulders since childhood becomes measurable exactly as it slides off. Racism, the waters she lived in. They molded her like an invisible sculptor. As a teen, she stood at the mirror and hated her midnight complexion. In college, she ran through white frat guys in college to prove she was desirable. In her career, she tiptoed around laws to be safe and respectable. Racism had her in its grip from the womb.
Racism heaped the nightmare of centuries on her. It would always exist, so she hedged bets to abide by it. Not tonight. Not anymore. Glancing from face to face, she knows that tonight, America is done. The people saw the darkness of slavery open beneath their feet. Just one law cracked, and the hell the ancestors survived reached for them anew.
Burn it. Burn it down.
The LSD kicks in and she climbs a streetlight. The people hit police barricades like a tsunami. Cops and riot shields fly into the air. Tear gas clouds twist around bodies like hands made of smoke. Thundering chants bowl up and down the avenues. Fire churns from the broken windows of City Hall.
The LSD erases layer after layer of her ego. Holding on to the light, Iwosan reaches fingertips out to the brewing revolution and wipes her face, tearing off the mask she wore her whole life. Black love swells like a sunrise. And it feels good.
A loud explosion tears the roof off the police station. Fire flares from more buildings. This is it. They are leaving America. Goodbye, baby. Adios.
Feeling crazy joy, she cries and laughs. And jumps into the march.