Ketamine
Ketamine is an animal tranquilizer that can knock you out and leave you unconscious. This can make any activity a deadly experience.
AKA
K, special K, vitamin K, cat valium
What is it?
Ketamine hydrochloride, or "K," is a powerful anesthetic used as an animal tranquilizer by veterinarians. This drug is medically designed for use during operations and medical procedures.
The Risks
Ketamine produces a range of effects, from intoxication to delirium. It can also make you unable to move and feel pain. Since it's an anesthetic, you can easily black out and forget what happened while under the drug's influence.35 When combined with simple activities like driving, this drug can become deadly.
Ketamine users describe a side effect of the drug that is a terrifying experience called a "K-hole" In this state, there's a sense of complete detachment from your body, combined with an inability to move. The result is something that feels like a near-death experience. 36
Ketamine users describe a side effect of the drug that is a terrifying experience called a "K-hole" In this state, there's a sense of complete detachment from your body, combined with an inability to move. The result is something that feels like a near-death experience. 36
LONG-TERM EFFECTS
Using ketamine can cause profound physical and mental problems, including impaired learning ability and memory, amnesia and potentially fatal respiratory problems.
THE BOTTOM LINE
In some cases, ketamine can make you black out and become unable to move, so you'll feel like you're dead. In other cases, it can make you black out while you continue to be able to move, so you can imagine how that could lead to a dangerous, or even deadly, situation.
Can Ketamine be Good?
Dr. Carlos A. Zarate, Jr.,
Chief of Experimental
Therapeutics of the Mood
and Anxiety Disorders
Program at the National
Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH).
Photo courtesy of NIH/NIMH
Chief of Experimental
Therapeutics of the Mood
and Anxiety Disorders
Program at the National
Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH).
Photo courtesy of NIH/NIMH
An experimental medication called ketamine relieves depression in just hours. Is it a key to the future of treatment?
Today's medications for depression take 4 to 6 weeks or longer to start working for most patients. But that long wait may become much shorter in the future.
A new study has revealed more about how a medication called ketamine, when used experimentally for depression, can relieve symptoms of depression in hours instead of weeks or months. Ketamine itself probably won't come into use as an antidepressant because of its side effects, notes lead researcher Carlos A. Zarate, Jr., M.D., Chief of Experimental Therapeutics of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). But the new finding moves scientists considerably closer to understanding how to develop faster-acting antidepressant medications.
"This may be a key to developing medications that eliminate the weeks or months patients have to wait for antidepressant treatments to kick in," says Dr. Zarate.
Ketamine works by blocking a receptor called NMDA on brain cells. A new 2007 study in mice reveals that this is just one of the steps involved. It turns out that ketamine blocks the NMDA receptor and increases the activity of another receptor, AMPA. Both of the receptors are binding sites for a chemical messenger in the brain called glutamate. This interplay of the two receptors appears to be crucial for ketamine's rapid actions.
"Our research is showing us how to develop medications that get at the biological roots of depression. This new finding is a major step toward learning how to improve treatment for the millions of Americans with this debilitating disorder; toward eliminating the weeks of suffering and uncertainty they have to endure while they wait for their medications to work," says NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D.