Black Psychedelic Revolution: From Trauma to Liberation is a journey through the author’s use of psychedelics through the likes of mushrooms, psylocibin, marijuana, LSD as alternative paths to a larger healing from racialized trauma. Powers tracing the journey from childhood listening to his mother’s experience with psychedelics to his own journey to which he attests the healing properties of the drugs. Powers weaves through imagination and reality to examine how psychedelics can also impact the countless instances of seeing and reading about Black trauma from Frederick Douglass to Chris Rock and Will Smith to Richard Pryor. He looks at how the trauma of Blacks constantly seeing trauma over and over through Trayvon Martin and George Floyd constantly re-exposes Black people to states of PTSD. The Black experience in America is one long testament to trauma.

Powers believes that controlled and supervised exposure to Psychedelics could open up a new and different path to healing for Blacks by helping us face the trauma of living in America by lifting us out of the cultural norms of racism. Powers sets down three factors for that healing process in Set, Setting and Culture. Set is knowing why you’re using psychedelics. Setting is the place the experience will happen. Usually in a foreign country as psychedelics are outlawed against the general public. Last is Culture which establishes the context in which the trip will be taken. The latter respects a person’s belief system and how they might be guided into the process with less shock to the psyche. Notably Powers discourages the use of psychedelics by those who might have a mental health diagnosis of schizophrenia etc. as the trip could acerbate the problem

Powers raises a scenario of a fictional psychedelic center that is opposed and protested by Black Israelites and the Nation of Islam as the usual suspects decrying the use of the Black community to disseminate illicit drugs. I question whether those groups would fit into such a scenario so completely. The larger Black community does have a history of being experimented upon and being targeted by U. S. as in the crack epidemic of the 80s. I guess the scenario stuck out to me as a knee jerk reaction to those two religious’ communities in seeing psychedelics as a threat. The Black community can generally be thought of as conservative publicly but something else behind closed doors. But I did get the gist of the story in pushback from a new thing.

Black Psychedelic Revolution is an exploration of where we can go as a people to heal and the possibility of that process as society slowly begins to see the medical possibilities. I doubt the establishment will ever embrace psychedelics for the same reason the author espouses their benefits. It might be the source of another kind of revolution to overthrow those forces in society built up out of oppression and exploitation which is most of the world we know. I suggest the read of Black Psychedelic Revolution as an offering of the possibilities of the worlds we’ve come to accept as normal when it does not have to be this way. The book is a feverish journey in and out of fiction and reality and can be a bit disorienting which Powers intends. I can’t say the book left me with any hope from a psychedelic revolution, but it did remind me that the world we see is not the only world and our salvation may be the road to our very souls through psychedelics cutting through the concrete of modern life.