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Dr. Nicholas Powers will be joining us for a lecture. Powers is a literature professor, novelist and journalist. He has facilitated workshops from Occupy Wall Street, PEX, Burning Man and the California Institute for Integral Studies, and his writings have appeared in The Village Voice, Huffington Post, The Raw Story, Truth-Out, The Indypendent, Business Insider, Chacruna, Double Blind and the MAPS Spring 2018 newsletter. He has been interviewed by Naropa University’s “The Root” program on psychedelics and race. His latest book, a political vampire book titled, “Thirst” just came out, and his prior book “The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street” was published in 2014 by Upset Press. He’ll be talking with us tonight about psychedelics and race.

As Powers sees it, the psychedelic hype machine is going 100mph, but the reality has not caught up. Amidst all the headlines, basic questions such as, say, how can LSD or molly or ‘shrooms cut the intergenerational trauma loops for working class people of color, are barely talked about. In this presentation, Dr. Powers looks at how a Container beyond the basic ideas currently being put forth in the medical model’s ideas of “Set and Setting” are necessary when bringing psychedelic care to those who are marginalized.

He’ll explore the Black Freedom Movement as a potential container. In Dr. Powers’ words: “In the Black Freedom Movement, freedom is found by returning to the body, a political and risky act because under white supremacy, the body is what we are exiled from. Psychedelics can be the yellow brick road back home.”