Ravers, doctors, and therapists of the world unite.
This is the story of how ketamine quietly took over the planet.
Over the years, ketamine has carved out its own part of the night.
And it’s not so much peak time in a rowdy club as it is later on,
when ravers return to their friends’ houses for after parties
to take ket and talk absolute rubbish.
Kind of feel like I’m grabbing red energy from the ground
and injecting it into myself.
My hand’s working like an alien hand.
I couldn’t feel two fingers on my hands.
And I jumped in another universe,
and I could see myself as an alien dancing on a beach.
What?!
That was **** up, man. I was a **** alien.
[The War on Drugs Show]
This is the story of how, despite the incontinence, the jibberish,
the delusions, and the crusties, the knocked-out horses
and a concerted international attempt to shut it down,
ketamine has quietly been winning battle after battle
in the war on drugs,
to the delight of doctors, ravers, and therapists worldwide.
You have to do K at least 500 times
before you even start to understand it.
Ketamine’s story begins in 1956
at a pharmaceuticals company in the United States.
Researchers found that a new drug called phencyclidine or PCP
made a wonderful anesthetic for small mammals.
But while this was a red letter day for all the little monkeys and rats
waiting for life-saving medical procedures,
PCP didn’t cut it as an anesthetic for humans.
It made them weird and angry when they woke up,
sometimes for hours on end.
So, a bunch of PCP derivatives were synthesized.
One compound in particular,
developed by a chemist named Calvin Stevens in 1962,
was a revelation,
a short-lasting anesthetic called CI-581.
This is the compound now known to you and I
as Special K, rhino smasher, wonk or ketamine.
After a number of years in testing,
ketamine was approved by the FDA in 1970.
Almost immediately, it was put to use on American soldiers
in the Vietnam War.
Ketamine is unique among anesthetics;
it barely affects the respiratory system.
This meant that in Vietnam, dying soldiers could be pumped full of ket,
operated on and saved without doctors having to cart pain in the arse
breathing machines around the burning, deadly jungle.
This trait means the drug remains vital today the world over.
In the West, it’s used by trialed surgeons and dentists.
In the developing world,
it’s used in the many operating rooms that don’t have breathing machines
or reliable electricity.
And despite the many dystopian advances in warfare
the last 50 years, Navy SEAL medics still swear by ketamine.
They love its ability to rapidly subdue soldiers who’ve been
heavily wounded or even lost multiple limbs in combat
by relieving pain,
but also by administering a timely dose of amnesia.
Despite the global ban proposed by China in 2015,
ketamine remains an essential medicine
in the eyes of the World Health Organization.
Most of the world’s ketamine is
manufactured in secretive factories in Asia,
and the vast majority still ends up in the hands of vets and doctors.
But despite it being torturously difficult to make,
some drug gangs have cracked the chemical code.
It’s not just doctors who lap it up,
it’s psychonauts and club kids, too.
If the authorities catch you smuggling or dealing drugs in China,
they might kill you.
But the bulk of the world’s recreational supply is
synthesized there,
and many Chinese continue to snort ket with wanton abandon.
In fact, foreign journalists have repeatedly discovered revelers
openly bingeing on the drug in all-night karaoke hotels.
In the four years that followed its UK ban,
use of K among 16-to-24-year-olds did not drop off,
it doubled.
In 2018, the amount of ketamine seized by the police
had risen by 30 percent,
and more young Brits were taking it than ever before.
With enthusiasm for ket seemingly growing in the US, Europe, and Asia,
it’s time to bring you up to speed.
What is a K-hole?
So, the K-hole is that state of complete disconnection from the world
that you get when you take ketamine.
I’ve heard people describe it as like putting your brain on airplane mode,
and that means basically you don’t get any inputs from outside.
People don’t notice, for instance,
that they're freezing to death if they're out in the winter
or they don’t notice if they’re drowning when they’re
taking ketamine in the bath.
Doesn’t ketamine make you incontinent, too?
So the K-bladder is a real thing, it’s not an urban myth.
There are people in Britain who've had to have their bladders removed
on account of the damage that ketamine use has
done to their bladders.
So why do people take it if it first paralyzes you
and then makes you piss yourself?
So ketamine is popular because of
the interesting mental state it produces.
It's also used after parties to help people come down from being
overactive, overstimulated.
It is an anesthetic; it calms down the brain,
it dampens down activity,
and lets people sort of chill out in a chemical way.
The most interesting thing about ketamine today, though,
isn’t that it’s used to anesthetize pets
or help stressed out hedonists get wonky.
It’s that more and more doctors and psychologists across the world
are heralding ketamine as a life-changing
and potentially life-saving treatment
for otherwise unshakeable cases of depression.
It eats you alive, it’s just, you feel like...
there's no other option but to say,
“This is it, I can’t take it no more.”
I tried going to the doctor,
they tried to prescribe some pills and it wasn’t doing anything,
so I just said, “Forget it.”
And now I’m doing ketamine treatments.
For years, ketamine has been available as a last-ditch treatment
for depression sufferers in low-key, off-label drip clinics,
both stateside and in the UK.
In these controlled conditions, it seems to be especially effective
for an estimated third of depression patients
for whom all other methods have failed.
Often these are people who see ketamine as their final hope.
Most currently available treatments for depression,
they’re mostly based upon what’s called
the seratonin hypothesis of depression
and the idea that you don’t have enough serotonin,
you don’t have enough of these feel-good hormones in the brain,
and if you replace them with medicines that increase those levels,
you feel better.
And they work moderately well.
But when I read the early papers on ketamine,
there had only been a few studies at that point back in 2010,
they spun my head around
because they were unique in some very important ways
and the results were dramatic.
Until now, in psychiatry, there was no drug which would act so fast
and which would save lives so fast, and with such an immediate effect.
So ketamine is a life-saving drug, according to me.
Now, K is taking its first steps out of these clinics
to more widespread therapeutic use.
In 2019, the FDA approved a ketamine nasal spray
for Americans suffering severe depression.
And ketamine therapy has shown positive effects when used to treat
other conditions too, like PTSD and alcoholism.
Before, it was just a staple.
It was as close to normal to drink a beer
as it would be to drink a glass of water when you’re thirsty.
How much exactly have you drunk in the last two months?
If you exclude last night,
I’ve literally had four glasses of wine.
-In 60 days, more or less? -Yeah.
It may lack the glamorous associations of cocaine
and the kudos of ecstasy.
There’s certainly going to be no
white wall retrospectives in 20 years’ time
about how the ketamine generation’s ‘Summer of Wonk’
changed the planet forever.
But for decades, K has been quietly winning
battles in the war on drugs worldwide,
thwarting bans and cultural concerns about horses and nappies,
and beguiling medical experts
to extend its empire through every populated continent.
When China asked the UN to ban it, ketamine won.
Where it has been outlawed by governments,
recreational users almost invariably sustained or increased.
Despite the barriers put up by the war on drugs,
ketamine’s therapeutic potential is finally being realized.
And the next few years could usher in its third act as a legal tool
for therapists seeking to save the lives of countless depressed people
the world over.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.