People on these type of drugs long term end up with severe memory issues, fogfy brained all the time, and if its ketamine add in a completely obliterated bladder.
I dont think this is an idea that can be dismissed trivially as a fallacy.
"Opiates are dangerous and they are anesthetics; therefore ketamine is dangerous because it's an anesthetic" is, literally, a textbook logical fallacy.
If you'd like to argue that ketamine is dangerous based on some other reasoning, go ahead, but that doesn't change the fact that OP's logic is prima facie fallacious.
> Ever met an nmda receptor agonist addict?
I used to work in drug counseling, so, yes.
Except that I never made that exact argument. Textbook strawman fallacy.
Sure, but it's also a fallacy to assume that nothing bad can happen in the long-term just because it appears promising in the short-term. I wasn't saying it's gonna happen the same exact way as it did with heroin (of course it won't, it's not an opiate), I was just making an example of a drug that happened to appear benign and promising, but have serious unforeseen consequences in the long term.
Ketamime has already been widely used for decades, in much larger doses than whats being discussed. We're not talking "short-term" here.
> I was just making an example of a drug that happened to appear benign and promising, but have serious unforeseen consequences in the long term.
Even that is a misrepresentation of the history of heroin. I guess it could appear that way if you take the Bayers advertising materials at face value (but hopefully you're not doing that). The dangers of opiates - and of morphine derivatives specifically - were well established by the time heroin was released.
The fact that two drugs both can be used as an anesthetic doesn't tell you very much besides that, especially when comparing across different drug classes.
For example, cocaine and novocaine are both anesthetics that belong to the same drug class, and yet they have radically different risk profiles, despite both being commonly used in outpatient medical settings.
Ketamine is in a completely different category of drugs from cocaine and novocaine, which are also totally different from opiates.
It's a fallacy to assume that ketamine would be subject to the same issues as opiates just because both happen to be usable as anesthetics.