I had ketamine during wakeful surgery.
Loved it. Grateful it was available.
But I had prev. experience w/ psychedelics & had learned/practiced how to: let go, place attention on what's positive & cease to have expectations.
Some of the most chill and relaxed moments of my entire life have been on ketamine. I only do it occasionally because of the nasty chronic side-effects, though.
(Though I don't believe whether it's enjoyable in the right setting has much to do with whether cops should be using it. I get that this is a defense of ketamine as a recreational drug, but e.g. alcohol would probably be un-fun if the first time you experienced it was at a high dose during either surgery or an arrest, and that one's widely accepted as a reasonable recreational drug.)
And it comes in waves -- just when you think you're coming out of it, it pulls you back down.
I swore off ketamine for life after that and don't plan on ever touching it again. I would take a bad comedown from stimulants over that. I would take the feeling of hopelessness, anhedonia, and thorough depression from a bad MDMA comedown any day. To be fair, both things only happen if you do too much, it's avoidable, and it was entirely my fault for not weighing the dose.
And I still think therapeutic ketamine for depression should be studied and trialled and legal. But still, K-holing was an absolutely horrifying experience and I don't recommend it to anyone for any reason.
And it probably was only not even worse because I was also on MDMA.
However, it absolutely sounds like it could be hell if you're not prepared though - especially in police custody, but even just fighting against it in a party situation where you want to exist and be social could be problematic.
This was my exact experience with disossiatives as well. I think they can be effectively and safely used, but there's a real danger there. Disossiatives like ketamine and DXM are incredibly powerful.
After my experience in that same eternal void I struggled with a fear that what I'd experienced was the natural state of consciousness, and what would happen to me for eternity after I died. I didn't actually believe it, but the fear was still there and talk. Took a few months for it to wear off.
It is truly disturbing to imagine going through that during an arrest, with no idea what is happening
As a youth I did all the drugs and hallucinogens there are and most of them are _nothing_ compared to an anesthetic dose of ketamine. It's the most disassociate experience I've ever had. It feels like you're grasping at your consciousness but can't quite get hold. The hallucinations are incomprehensible. I was told my screaming was heard in the waiting room.
Ketamine is a party drug especially common among young gay people here in Brazil. It's usually briefly inhaled so I'm guessing very low doses. The 500mg mentioned in the article sounds terrible.
No, it doesn't have to be bad at all if it's not used in a bad setting and most people enjoy the effects. It wouldn't be a common drug otherwise. See https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/d3dxzq/we-asked-people-ab...
That procedure also most likely involved ketamine - I don't know for sure, it was a long time ago and nobody told me the names of anything but the Versed and that only because I asked, but I had totally uncharacteristic recurring nightmares and emotional problems for the next little while afterward. When all of that came back up during planning for the surgery I had to have last year, my surgeon noted that that sounded in his experience like ketamine side effects, and that this time I'd be getting propofol, which is not at all a dissociative, instead. And, sure enough, I was just fine after that surgery, despite it being much more invasive and thus painful in its aftereffects.
Based on that, I'll echo what others here have already said: the thought of being given a surprise high dose of ketamine, in the context of a situation that also involves the use of violence against one's person, is horrifying, and complex PTSD is the least severe consequence I can imagine.
You mean like paramedics? The article states that paramedics administer the drug.
> Think of the hypnosis scene from "Get Out"
this is EXACTLY right.
> an empty void for an eternity when it was only a few minutes.
if you maintained the ability to interpret audio and visual inputs, then probably 20-30 minutes, if SWIM had to guess.
> the thought that police use it to pacify someone during an arrest is sickening.
this is EXACTLY right.
reminds me of the psychonaught/rapist sex therapist guy who was mega-dosing women with MDMA or 2CB before forcing himself on them.
The ketamine experience was far worse than my fall and any subsequent pain I experienced, and I would gladly take the pain of the reduction over the ketamine any day. It basically felt like I was dying and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Think of the hypnosis scene from "Get Out" where you can feel your consciousness slipping away but you're not asleep either. I could hear everything happening around me but couldn't move a muscle or feel anything. My perception of time went out the window and it felt like I was in an empty void for an eternity when it was only a few minutes.
I thought I couldn't talk because I couldn't feel my mouth or move any other muscles, but realized I was actually speaking my thoughts after I heard a friend in the room responded to something I thought in my mind.
Overall, 0/10 would not do it again and the thought that police use it to pacify someone during an arrest is sickening.