The rise and fall and rise of ketamine

Ketamine is back with a wonky vengeance after years of limited supplies, shonky stand-ins and a tripling in street price. Just three years ago ketamine in the UK all but dried up, but now the drug can be found at levels of high purity in most major cities in the UK, albeit at an increased £20-30 per gram. So what’s been going on?

The answer, as always when it comes to new drug developments, can be found in Chinese drug labs and the murkier corners of the dark web. But first some history, context and chemistry. What is ketamine, and why do people use it? In Kit Kelly’s peerless work on the drug, The Little Book Of Ketamine, the author includes a suitably bizarre foreword by James Kent:

“[Ketamine] unlocks powers so intense and improbable it is hard to believe such a substance could exist. At first glance, it might look like a simple pet anaesthetic, but when you actually try ketamine, it seems to violate all boundaries of what we think is possible. While the notion of cosmic journeys in a cat tranquilizer may seem silly, ketamine is much more complex than it appears.”

What kind of drug brings together kittens and quantum science? Where does it come from, what does it do to you, how safe is it, and how did an anaesthetic become a drug used on dancefloors?

In public recreational use, ketamine tends to be used in sub anaesthetic doses; small bumps give a sense of euphoric dislocation, a loose rubberiness to the legs, and a feeling of floating. Too much, and you’re into the K-Hole, immobilised as your mind travels through itself and back and beyond.

Ketamine’s main medicinal use is as an anaesthetic for children, or car crash victims, or for people wounded on the battlefield, as well as in poorer countries, because unlike general anaesthesia, no expert backup team is required since the drug does not disable your respiratory system. It is used by vets to tranquilise pets ahead of surgery, since the drug blocks pain channels and wears off quickly.

The drug first appeared in the UK in significant quantities in the early 90s, when ravers fresh back from Goa’s trance scene bought or posted litres of the drug, disguised as rosewater back home. Ketamine was at that time legal in India, and could be bought for just a few pounds a gramme. It was only class C in the UK, putting it on a par with drugs such as anabolic steroids or sleeping pills.

It became more popular in the UK through the 90s and 00s, and was hugely popular on the squat party scene, where it was known by some people as ‘techno smack’. In late 2013, supplies dried up. India, where most ketamine was made at that time, rescheduled the drug into its most stringent category, schedule X, which hit supplies hard.

In the following years, various research chemicals such as methoxetamine, diphenidine, and 3-MeO-PCP took ketamine’s place, as well as other anaesthetics such as tiletamine, all of which are more potent and, users say, less pleasant experiences. But in around 2014, Chinese labs began synthing the drug in industrial quantities.

Martin Raithelhuber, a specialist in synthetic drugs at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Organised Crime says hundreds of labs have been busted there in recent years, and this is where much of the world’s newly potent ketamine is made.

“Seizures reach record heights, with most of them done in China. Evidence of illicit ketamine labs outside China, where they bust over 100 annually, is scarce, but in 2016, the first ketamine lab was dismantled in Malaysia,” he says.

The world’s most infamous ketamine user, John Lilly, didn’t do things by half-measures. Lilly, who died in 2001 aged 86, started out as a biophysicist, inventor, neuroscientist and physician. He ended up as a countercultural legend and one of the world’s most out-there psychedelic explorers.

Lilly suffered from daily intense migraines, until he was offered ketamine by an associate.

150mg of ketamine cured him for life. He then invented the flotation, or sensory deprivation tank, which he used to make his ketamine experiences more intense and focused. He even built himself a creepy mask with a built-in snorkel so he could stay submerged for hours.

Lilly once injected himself with 50mg of ketamine intravenously every hour for over a week. He, perhaps unsurprisingly, invented a highly elaborate cosmology around the drug, believing that it put him into contact with the extra terrestrials who he believed operate the universe, named ECCO – the Earth Coincidence Control Office.

Other research projects included dolphin communication and his obsession with whales remains unparalleled. But bizarre though Lilly’s claims and actions seem to be, he was a pioneer in the way that he saw and experienced ketamine’s medical potential outside anaesthesia.

Today, as well as making a return to the festival fields and dancefloors and sofas of the UK, ketamine is being used as a new category of anti-depressant, or in the treatment of post traumatic stress disorder. It has been proposed as a tool to treat alcoholics, and recently it was reported that the drug helped one child from Glasgow, Romi Löffler, who suffers from the rare and debilitating Rett Syndrome, recover the power of speech after years of being unable to talk. There are labs in New York and elsewhere in the US where patients can be attached to a drip of the drug in a bid to treat depression and chronic pain.

For my book, Drugs 2.0, I interviewed a man who had phantom limb pain in an amputated limb, which he self-medicated using ketamine for years. He ended up inventing a legal version of ketamine, methoxetamine, that is still sought out by psychonauts worldwide since it is now banned.

And all over the dark web, Chinese-synthed ketamine, now in huge crystals and rocky chunks, or shining tiny shards, are changing hands for about £20-30 a gram, though stocks seem to sell out in moments. Purity is said to be high.

It’s worth noting, in conclusion, that ketamine is a seductively addictive substance. People under its influence have little to no control over their bodies, and can face harms such as road traffic accidents, drowning (baths and ketamine do not mix) or serious falls.

What’s more, repeated use will have you urinating blood that feels like it is laced with a million tiny razor blades – when you’re straight, as ketamine damages bladders like few other chemicals. Sufferers have reported that the only cure for their malady is, grimly, more ketamine. Serious abusers have ended up with their bladders removed, replaced with a bag and tube system.

Expert users and open-minded medics agree: whatever your poison, but perhaps with ketamine above all other recreational substances, take care of yourself, and your friends.

Mike Power is the author of Drugs 2.0 and a regular contributor to Mixmag. Follow him on Twitter

Sam Taylor is a freelance illustrator. Follow him on Instagram