Black Psychedelia: 5 Questions for author Nick Powers

Powers discusses his new book and his hopes for the future of psychedelic healing.

To Nick Powers, psychedelics were initially a way to bond with friends at college in the 1990s. The people around him at Emerson College felt that these substances would help free their minds from the establishment. He wanted that freedom too. By 2001, Powers had moved back to New York City, his hometown, to begin graduate school, and then planes struck the World Trade Center and the towers fell. The event unmoored Powers, who said he constantly felt like he was "walking in the shadows of the towers." The next summer, he went to Burning Man, and grew frustrated by how many of the attendees were west coast children of hippies who didn’t understand what he and so many other New Yorkers had lived through. A fellow Burner gifted Powers ecstasy and LSD, and encouraged him to take them: “It’s not a cure, but it’s going to open some doors, and I think you should go through them,” the man told him. So Powers did and when he returned to New York and became a part of the underground psychedelic scene. “I was reborn, and my art was reborn,” he said.

Now, Powers is an associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, and his new book, Black Psychedelic Revolution, was published by Penguin Random House in January. The Microdose spoke with him about his new book and his hopes for the future of psychedelic healing.

Your new book focuses on Black psychedelia. You’ve previously written that psychedelics healed your “double consciousness” — what did you mean by that?

I’ll first define “double consciousness” — W.E.B. DuBois is credited with coining this term in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. He says that the American Negro is forced to feel this kind of doubleness, being American and being a Negro, and only his dogged strength keeps him from being torn asunder. And the idea is contested; Zora Neale Hurston criticized it in her essay, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me” – it depends on how people define their Blackness, and what emphasis they give it.

But for me, seeing myself through the eyes of others was a big part of my experience. When I went to college, it was very white, and at the time, there were parts of Boston that were like sundown towns; bartenders would tell me not to go to Southie, not because they were being racist but because they were trying to look out for me. I realized quickly that there was a difference in how I saw myself and how others saw me, and part of the experience of being a minority is figuring out how to navigate that. Sometimes you can use it to your advantage - almost like you’re playing a poker game, but instead of a hand of cards, you have a hand of mirrors, and all those mirrors have different reflections of you - and you’re constantly gambling with those reflections.

One of the times I took acid, I realized I had internalized some of the images other people had of me — it was the psychedelic that excavated these many different layers of me, like an archeological site. Some of these twisted, racist images had sunk their barbs into me, and I pulled them out; I could see that these images were not real, and they were outweighed by images filled with love. I imagined myself as a child, projected images of myself as an old man, thought of images of being with my friends. Dozens and dozens of hands over the year had shaped the soft clay of me into me. My double consciousness was cured when I realized the reality of who I am, and my value.

What led you to write this book?

At first, it was sheer vanity. I got an email from an acquisitions editor at North Atlantic books four years ago - he’d seen some of my talks and asked if I’d be interested in writing a book about psychedelics. The ambient heat from the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement had led a lot of primarily liberal, ideologically progressive, white-run organizations and publishing companies realized they had been caught with their pants down — and I think they also saw dollar signs to be able to sell books not only to other white readers, but an opportunity to grow a sizable readership of color. I think they saw me as a unicorn, and when they got in touch, I had just enough vanity to feel like Sally Field getting the Oscar, like, ‘Me?’

At first, the book was very autobiographical - I was the star of the show. I turned it in, and the editor said, ‘This is really great writing, but they want something more creative nonfiction, not about you.’ So I was like, ‘Ok, I’ll give the Oscar back’ – and I pressed pause on it, because my mom had just passed. Months later, I revisited the project, and got in touch with some agents through friends, who all encouraged me to write the Oprah book: a very general, pleasant, safe book about the medical model for psychedelics. It felt like a paint by numbers job; anyone can do it, if you know how to paint. I had reached a crossroads. Everywhere I go, my 6-year-old son is with me, even if not physically, then emotionally, and I asked myself: what would be the book that could give him a chance to live? What would be the book that could create or at least help pollinate a vision that could create a world he’d have a chance to thrive in? I walked towards him, towards that book.

So what is that book?

It’s a book about revolutionary politics. The theme that runs through revolutionary philosophy, from Hegel to Marx to Angela Davis. And it was the easiest thing in the world to write because it’s basically a 220-page love letter to my son, and his friends at the playground. In the end, it’s the only book I think I could have written. It’s not a paint by numbers book, but I hope it goes far beyond me and helps people reimagine what psychedelics can do for them in their personal lives and what political visions can come from it. I hope it leads to a better world long after I’m gone.

What does that world look like, and what role do psychedelics play in it?

It looks like psychedelic churches, and the Limelight, an old church turned into a New York house music venue where people did a lot of drugs. 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.

One of the levels of this world you imagine — the medical model — has hit some roadblocks in the last year, given the FDA’s rejection of Lykos’s new drug application for MDMA in treating PTSD. What do you make of that, and what do you see as the way forward?

I talked with someone who was deeply involved in that process, who considers the whole thing a big success. He said, ‘Look, it’s been illegal in the United States for a really, really long time, and the hype around its possible approval set people up for being crestfallen.’ But at some point it will be legalized, and maybe the two to three year delay will actually be a good thing.’ What that reprieve does is chase away some of the venture capitalist money, giving those who have been working in the underground, or between the underground and above ground, to soften the ground and make it more fertile for psychedelics, so when it does become legal, we’re digging canals towards what Rick Doblin dreamed: that mystical states of mind lead people to question themselves and society, and start seeing others with greater empathy. And I hope that my book and others, too, will help further soften the ground towards that dream.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.