Acid ruled the recreational drugs scene of the 1970’s. In the 80’s and early 90’s it was Heroin, later that decade it was Ecstasy. Now we are witnessing a new generation of thrill seekers, pioneering the trend in its next direction; with Ketamine. Ketamine is a powerful anaesthetic with many potential dangers. It seems that the drug scene is no exception to other spheres of history, where it only takes a certain amount of time before lessons learned are forgotten and history repeats itself, with another generation of partygoers bombarding their system with volatile substances, the long term damages of which are invariably and inevitably, unknown.
This is particularly accurate of Ketamine which is a relatively young drug. It has only been around since 1962, when it was developed and synthesized for medical purposes. It was used in medical practice to anesthetize patients during surgery until 1968, when its distribution became controlled under the Medicines Act. It was only made illegal in January 2006, when it was classified as a class C drug. This sharp turnabout in legality evolved as evidence of the substances’ immediate dangers became obvious, first through patients experiencing unwanted hallucinations and nightmares when under its influence and then with it’s escalating recreational use. Using Ketamine as an anaesthetic is now discouraged in medicine, but it is still common in the veterinary practice, in developing countries and under exceptional conditions such as battlefields.
Its medical history gives Ketamine a dangerous aura of safety for abusers, who assume that if doctors use it then the harmful affects must be minimal. The fact is however that there is a reason Ketamine is now reserved for use on animals, the poor and soldiers; doctors are disturbingly aware that the long term affects of Ketamine use are ambiguous, and that emerging evidence suggests that these may be adverse and serious. This is a familiar phenomenon in the medical profession, where Heroin, for example, would theoretically be the most effective painkiller of all but it’s now renowned dangers prohibit its use.
Ketamine started being used recreationally in the mid 1990’s, and since then regular abuse of the substance has become an escalating problem in the UK. Between 1999 and 2003 the percentage of regular users in England increased form 4% to 16%.1 This would put the number of people using Ketamine at a massive 9.7 million in 2003. This trend is apparent everywhere, on a small scale. Attend any house party in Hyde Park and you will be sure to see at least three semi-unconscious people drooling on the sofa. At all of the summers festivals the selling and buying of Ketamine was particularly apparent, with groups of barely-18-year-old’s tripping out all over. As a by-product of this rapid absorption of Ketamine into the drug scene a research vacuum has developed, with science only having tested the affects that Ketamine have at a very sterile, controlled and monitored medicinal level, and not in a context where clubbers snort unknown amounts of Ketamine, mixed with allsorts, three times a week.
Ketamine’s increased popularity is mysterious. The substance causes a sense of detachment of mind and being, as the body becomes numbed by the anaesthetic qualities of the drug. A heightened sensitivity to colour and sound is common. Hallucinations are a possibility, as is nausea, an inability to move, referred to as ‘descent into a K-hole’, and paranoia. Cumulatively therefore, Ketamine can be a rather anti-social drug, with many people becoming less animated or happy and very lethargic under its influence. Perhaps Ketamine’s ‘it’ factor of the moment is what is spurring the popularity, explaining the tendency of users to start very young. In 2003, 49.33%2 of users tried Ketamine before the age 20. More likely however, is that we are currently in what can be referred to as the ‘honeymoon period’ of the drug. Everybody is talking about it, it was only recently illegalized, it is very accessible and, most significantly, the extent of its harmfulness has not yet revealed itself.
There has been no major scare or publicised incident with Ketamine to bring home the immediate dangers of the drug, like Leah Betts, 18, tragically did with Ecstasy in 1995. Her overdose received extensive media coverage and raised awareness and alarm among many. The immediate hazards with Ketamine are manifold and fairy obvious; desensitizing your body to pain or direct contact with heat, for example, can lead to serious injury. Driving when control of your bodily functions is impaired, and mixing an anaesthetic like Ketamine, with depressant such as alcohol can lower your awareness, and additionally your heart rate and blood circulation to a level not far from cardiac arrest. The problem is that such dangers have not been publicly emphasized in the media, enabling users, to keep themselves in a honeymooning state of denial.
There is additional threat in the underlying long term risks, of which users are genuinely unaware. There is even a scientific impossibility of testing the long term risk of specific substance abuse on human’s, due to ethics regarding medical testing. Ketamine’s affects are particularly ambiguous since we are the first generation to delve into its recreational abuse so wholeheartedly. There have been no previous guinea pigs in the form of 90 year old grannies suffering relapses and severe brain degeneration as there has been with LSD, or teenagers becoming schizophrenic as a result of cannabis abuse at a certain stage of brain development. It would not be foolish to assume that Ketamine, a substance used for sedation, when applied repeatedly to the brain, would probably encourage some form of brain degeneration. Tests conducted on lab rats revealed that prolonged and heavy exposure to the drug produced holes in their brains and death as a consequence. Although rats and humans are obviously very different, the limited studies undertaken on humans have concurred, demonstrating a definite affect on memory, and brain patterns similar to psychoses and schizophrenia developing when exposed to the drug. The personal experience of Ketamine users in Leeds also supports this theory. One regular user, Bob* will ask what I’ve been up to today, and after my reply, will then ask the same question 10 minutes later with genuine inquisitiveness. A one time user, Sandra* experienced relapses so physically impairing that she had to pull her car over on several occasions up to a week after consuming large quantities of Ketamine. Hoever, in the same way it was for the previous decades of drug experimentation, time will be the only reliable test for the fate of the generation who decided to use horse tranquilizer to get high.
*names have been changed for anonymity purposes.
