Black Psychedelic Revolution by Nicholas Powers PhD

Author:Nicholas Powers, PhD [Powers, PhD, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: North Atlantic Books

“Happy Birthday to you,” the crowd sang to Hoffman. He palmed his chest and waved at adoring fans in the hall. It was 2006. It was his 100th birthday. The gathering was a psychedelic research conference in Oslo, Sweden. At the end, they sent an open letter to governments all over to restart LSD research. The scene was from How to Change Your Mind. Next you see Dr. Peter Gasser, giddy at getting LSD from the Swedish Health Ministry and walking the streets, holding the first legal dose in decades.

I paused the video and leaned back. The scene had switched to Hoffman, who leaned on a cane. He visited Gasser after the Swedish state gave the greenlight for LSD research to give his blessing. Two years later, in 2008, Hoffman died.

The father of LSD teasingly called it his “problem child.” He did not see the Psychedelic Renaissance. He died just as Drug War propaganda was thawing. I’ll go out on a limb and say, he never saw the knee-slapping magic mushroom scene in 2007’s Knocked Up when Seth Rogen ate caps and stems and had a shit-in-his-pants, full-blown panic attack at a Vegas circus show. Nor did Hoffman live to see How to Change Your Mind, where patients cried in relief with therapists. He missed officials in Oakland and Denver decriminalizing psychedelics. He visited Harvard to learn about new investment in psychedelic research.

If he had lived fifteen more years, he could have flown to Denver in 2023 to be honored at the psychedelic conference. Wheeled on stage, Hoffman would have been hugged by Doblin and loved by a stadium filled with nearly 13,000 adoring activists and researchers. He would have gotten his flowers.

I’m glad he didn’t. I can imagine the wild, thundering applause as thousands hung on his every word like from an oracle. He would have doubled down on his reformist ideology, which would have driven the Psychedelic Movement further in the wrong direction. However much Hoffman saw on LSD, he was more blinded by hope.

My face reflected on the screen, and I held the LSD tab again. What a strange, horrific time it was born into. When Hoffman first tasted LSD and bicycled home on April 19, 1943, roughly eight hundred miles away in Poland, a handful of Jewish insurgents in the Warsaw Ghetto fought Nazis. It was a modern Siege of Masada. Each Jew who battled Nazis knew they would die. The odds were overwhelming. Face-to-face with death, they saw more clearly than Hoffman on LSD or his acolytes in the ’60s Underground or today’s Psychedelic Renaissance. The Jewish resistance against the Final Solution saw past hope. They did not fight to save their lives. They fought to save their dignity.

I hold this contradiction to my chest like an ice pack. Every year, psychedelic activists celebrate Bicycle Day on April 19, when Hoffman took his first LSD trip. It is a fun day filled with celebrations and events. Yet I think of World War II roaring like a tornado of steel around the euphoric bubble of LSD’s birth.

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