War and peace

Medical

Ketamine’s been used as an anti-depressant for decades. Its effect on neurotransmitter glutamate may hold the key to understanding mental health

Vintage war poster from Antikbar Art

Ketamine’s actually been used as an antidepressant for many years, even in the NHS.

With D-list celebrities queuing up for ketamine, it’s even easier to write it off as a D-list consciousness expander. But that’d be both distastefully othering and ignorant of ketamine’s rich heritage.

Ketamine’s disinhibiting dissociative ‘emergent states’ comparable to psychedelic visions were noticed during its use as a battlefield anaesthetic in the Vietnam War. As were similar visions caused by its predecessor PCP AKA angel dust. The effects were studied in humans back in 1964.

Loads more scientific double-blind investigations have been conducted into ketamine compared to proper psychedelics. Ketamine could work even better when combined with a designer drug in the same family, cycloserine, used to treat tuberculosis and kidney disease. 

But ketamine’s authentic heritage treating mental health issues, plus its clarifying insights, aren’t all that’s worth bearing in mind before cocking any more snoops at the ketamine crew. 21st century neuroscience – and mycology – have dug up some astounding K-facts that endorse its use as a bio-psychological healing too.

According to the superb Psychedelic Science Review, ketamine causes and mediates release of neurotransmitters in a ‘glutamate surge’ that essentially causes neuroplasticity.

Ketamine could be “the most neuroplastic drug” as a psychiatrist commented in the Q&A after ketamine therapist Veronika Gold’s Vital lecture. Market anti-depressants only prompt limited aspects of this cascading process known as ‘brain derived neurotropic factor’ which isn’t dissimilar to the effects derived from healthy actives like cardio-vascular exercise. Un-mediated glutamate causes auto-immune and neurodegenerative diseases like ADHD, Parkinson’s and a raft of other conditions that psychedelics are associated with treating. Proper psychedelics are thought to do something similar but haven’t been lab-tested nearly as much as ketamine, so scientists can’t say for sure.

As above, so below

Integration

A fungus using K to clear parasites could hold the secret to the brain-body disease connection

Bacteria operating in fracal patterns observed by the late Dr Eschel Ben-Jacob

Pochonia Chlamydosporia is a fungus recently discovered to use ketamine for flushing parasites out of its host plant’s roots.

Discovered and hyped only recently, there are two eyebrow-raising elements to this. 

Firstly ketamine is a ‘designer drug’, or as elite space commando and neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore wrote on Twitter, “a perfect example of a purely synthetic molecule. The arylcyclohexylamines, of which ketamine is the prototypic example, are a product entirely of the human mind... Oh wait…”

Did the fungus get hold of it via the mycelial network? Is biology categorisable to the extent that a substance arrived at in lab tests can be naturally occurring but not yet discovered? Or did the Reality Switch Technologies Gallimore writes about come into play, somehow?

Some ketamine killing parasitic worm eggs

Secondly: Pochonia Chlamydosporia uses ketamine as an anti-microbial agent. A robust two-parter in Psychedelic Science Review dug out a 1987 study where ketamine did a great job killing bacterial heart lining infections in rabbits – and stopped the rabies virus breeding in rats.

In 2002 ketamine was tested against market antibiotics and crushed Staphylococcus aureus, a common opportunistic bacteria that causes all kinds of nastiness, from pimples and impetigo to MRSA and pneumonia… and has become 80% resistant to antibiotics since penicillin was invented in 1943.

The 2020 report from the un-putdownable Parasites & Vectors journal tested ketamine against agricultural anti-wormer ivermectin, which used to be advertised on TV back in the West Country to give you an idea of how widespread its farming use is. Ketamine performed equally well.

But what has actually captured the imaginations of many in the space is that this means ketamine counts as a ‘plant medicine’. I eagerly await the complex mythologies, concept albums, groundbreaking scientific discoveries, artistic genres, philosophical insights, and bespoke geometric fabric designs that shall surely now emerge from the ketamine subculture, such as it currently is.