March 26, 2025 8 mins
“If someone were to design the perfect drug for a teenager who is depressed and doesn’t have much money, this would be it…”
Ketamine is one of the more interesting drugs out there. It can make you feel relaxed, wobbly, trippy or, at a high dose, can send you down the K-hole, a state of intense detachment. Once the preserve of a few “psychonauts” in the Seventies, now the dissociative, hallucinogenic tranquiliser seems to be everywhere. It’s cheap, easy to get hold of and crosses social and class boundaries — wastewater analysis released last week found its use had increased by 85% in the past year. And while its popularity has been on the rise since the turn of the century, its unique high is especially embraced today by those aged between 16 and 24. Eclipsing MDMA, almost as popular as cocaine; Generation Z are now three times more likely to use ketamine than they were a decade ago.
Inevitably, the authorities, fired up by the mainstream media, have caught on. Citing the drug’s rising prevalence, its ability to ruin people’s bladders and its use in spiking, the Government wants to curtail its use by bumping it up from a Class B to a Class A drug, on a par with crack and heroin. Yet as history shows, moral panics about illicit substances often only tell half of their story. Drugs are never taken in isolation; they are taken for a reason. A drug’s rise or fall in popularity says something about the people taking them, but also the world they live in.
Ketamine was first developed back in the Sixties when it was tested on prison inmates who claimed it made them feel like “they had no arms or legs, or that they were dead”. Approved for medical use in the Seventies, the US army used it as a battlefield anaesthetic during the Vietnam War. Closer to home, vets started using it to tranquillise horses (and camels) before surgery. Meanwhile, in the wake of the counterculture revolution, the psychonauts were experimenting, enjoying how it opened new doors […]
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