The Ketamine Connection

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-bc7d54e7-88f6-4026-9faa-2a36d3359bb0

by herendin • 11 years ago

48 52 11 years ago

bbc.co.uk

ghotli• 11 years ago

The way this is constructed reminds me of "Snow Fall" from the NYT. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

Snow Fall was considered an incredible success in online presentation, and a lot of papers have tried to emulate it since. Any similarities you notice are probably not accidents.

steve192• 11 years ago

"Sometimes, they would use motorcycles to surround the police, threatening them with AK47 rifles and grenades."

Very, very unlikely. China has an almost complete ban on civilian ownership of firearms. The only exception is for rare hunting permits (there is very little hunting in China) and wildlife conservation. Even then traditional hunting tends to use blackpowder muzzle loaders (and they restrict ownership of black/gun powder)

They don't even allow regular cops to use useful firearms (they are issued a revolver that fires rounds with as much energy as a .22 LR ... enough to wound but not kill or even stop someone attacking police). They don't want the cops ever rebelling against the PLA.

The BBC wants us to believe that Chinese authorities allowed an armed militia to directly challenge law enforcement and did nothing about it for over a decade?

More likely that was just a story made up by bribed cops, cops who were shit scared of going into that village or cops/politicians who wanted extra credit for going into that village.

So I wonder how much else of this story is exaggerated by the journalist.

Fully automatic AK ownership, and even grenade ownership is fully legal in many or most US states, if you pay the required BATFE taxes and have the right permits (explosive storage permits for grenades) but so much wave one at a cop and you will be surrounded by armored cars and black helicopters sooner that you can blink.

bcraven• 11 years ago

I'm not sure the legalities of gun ownership would bother the members of an illegal drugs operation.

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

Not to mention, the very business of a drug cartel is literally smuggling illegal contraband into countries.

They are some of the last people that outlawing guns is going to stop.

vidarh• 11 years ago

He's not suggesting the legalities is the primary reason it sounds strange, but that the Chinese government appears to be less than likely to tolerate a criminal organization to have weapons that might allow it to become a threat, when they don't even allow the police access to similar weapons, much less civilians.

I have no idea what situations are like with respect to weapons in China, so I have no idea whether he's right or not, but this is not just about the legality.

titanomachy3• 11 years ago

Grenade ownership is fully legal in many or most US states

Do you have a source to back that up? I think you can own a grenade launcher, but I'm quite certain that grenades are very illegal... possibly excepting smoke grenades.

steve192• 11 years ago

See the NFA Act.

Each grenade is legally a separate destructive device. Some States outlaw destructive devices, but they are legal under Federal law (with appropriate permits).

You don't see people with them because there are not many transferable grenades left in circulation. If you want to shoot a bunch out of a m203 launcher it's cheaper to go to Cambodia than exhaust US civilian stocks.

perfTerm• 11 years ago

Great piece of investigative journalism.

BorisMelnik• 11 years ago

Great story. Some of these content pieces are becoming massive! I mean, that story was so large I wonder if they considered turning it into a short book, or expanding it into one and publishing?

jrapdx32• 11 years ago

Certainly a fascinating slant on ketamine, more familiar to me from reports documenting benefit in patients with severe, treatment-resistant depression. In clinical applications the dose is very small vs. street use and not associated with the destructive gut and brain side effects described in the article. However it's not innocuous, hallucinations or psychosis, among other side-effects, are known, non-trivial risks.

It has been a drug of abuse in the US, but nothing like the near-epidemic proportions going on in China. If the article is accurately describing conditions over there, it suggests it's probably only a matter of time before we'll see it in N. America.

Kind of ironic in a way. Here in Oregon cannabis is now legal for recreational use, and other states will probably join the handful that permit sale and possession of the drug. Widespread abuse of ketamine with harmful outcomes might inspire a new round of a "war on drugs" just as unnecessary controls on cannabis are being reduced.

Perhaps it might lead us to think that not all "recreational" drugs should be regarded as harmless or the same as others, and one set of rules does not fit all.

Edit: fix grammar.

civilian2• 11 years ago

The use is really small? Uh, no. In operating rooms the amount of ketamine they use is to _knock out_ the patient. Recreational uses are only interesting because they have less than a knockout dose. If you did twice the amount of a clinical knockout dose, you'd just be more knocked out, you wouldn't be tripping.

Here's the recreational dosage numbers: https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_dose.shtm...

Upon some more research, it appears I'm wrong. K isn't being used to knock people out anymore. (idk, my mom is a retired physician and she talked about how heart surgeons used to knock people out with k.) On page six you can find battlefield doses http://www.health.mil/~/media/MHS/Report%20Files/201203.ashx After you convert erowid's mg/lb to mg/kg it's clear that they're just giving light doses.

You can find some reference to high doses of ketamine in this review article: http://www.annals.in/article.asp?issn=0971-9784;year=2015;vo... "Similarly, Marlow et al. found that in coronary artery bypass patients, ketamine (2 mg/kg) caused significant decreases in stroke volume when used as an induction agent."

tl;dr it varies. Also repeated/daily usage of ketamine is definitely bad and will make you piss blood.

jawr3• 11 years ago

I think he was referring to it's use as an anti depressant: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2014/04April/Pages/Ketamine-tested-as...

ds_• 11 years ago

Here it is on Google maps: https://goo.gl/maps/6kZfb

joergsauer• 11 years ago

"Ketamine is still used in developing countries as an emergency anaesthetic."

Actually, it is on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines <http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/93142/1/EML_18_eng.... and used frequently and routinely in emergency procedures around the world, not just in "developing countries".

civilian2• 11 years ago

Yup. I was watching Inside Combat Rescue and they use ketamine all the time to knock out the wounded soldiers.

titanomachy3• 11 years ago

That's true. There are a few niche applications where it's used quite commonly, for example burn victims and the opiate-intolerant.

BgSpnnrs• 11 years ago

Still used in pediatrics in the UK. Just the BBC being the BBC.

joshcrowder• 11 years ago

I thought this, it's widely known in the UK to be used on paediatrics. It's also something the BBC has publicised before... Weird

pge• 11 years ago

Also in the US - my daughter was given ketamine when going into surgery.

alexandercrohde• 11 years ago

The thing I dislike about this article, as somebody who as experiment with ketamine (I took it twice two years ago, and then twice last month) is that the article's presentation implicitly vilifies ketamine a tad.

joeyo• 11 years ago

It's not all fun and games: ketamine will eventually destroy your bladder.

efng• 11 years ago

Yes it will,if you do 5 grams a day - which is a ridiculous amount. If you are doing that much, you might in fact be a horse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Urinary_tract_effects

ghshephard4• 11 years ago

A lot of drugs out there, crack, heroin, cocaine, heck, even MDMA will do damage eventually if you use it in large enough doses. For that matter, legal drugs like smoked cigarettes and alcohol have long time negative consequences with regular use.

I agree with the parent, this whole desire to vilify the monster-du-jour sometimes gets out of the hand, with the MSM frequently playing the willing companion to whatever government propaganda of the day is in vogue.

Can these drugs do damage if abused? Yes. So teach people not to abuse them, and, those who do, or become addicted, have medical issues that should be treated as such.

I'm willing to wager that not only would drug abuse come down, as light was shone on addicts rather than making them hide in the dark, but we'd also see reduced prison populations, and entirely eliminate a major source of income to criminal gangs.

This is probably the 1 Billionth+ time someone has made this argument on a forum though, so I don't hold out to much hope until the winds of sanity for, whatever strange reason they do, blow in that particular direction.

rwmj• 11 years ago

Alcohol can damage the bladder and bladder control in several different ways.

throwaway3452• 11 years ago

The dangers are real. I've known multiple recreational users come close to death from ketamine addiction, either from the effects or from general self-neglect.

The problems are threefold: firstly, it does not impair you to the extent that you cannot "live," you can still limp along through a normal life high out of your mind on ketamine every day. This means it is not self-limiting in any way, and people are not forced to change until they are seriously ill.

Secondly, the tolerance curve is very steep. If you use it just a few times in a week, the very next week you will need to consume noticeably more. It continues in a sort of hockey-stick arrangement. This is how people suddenly end up on 5g a day, destroying their urinary tract with this caustic, highly alkaline stuff.

Thirdly, some people seem to just really like it. Ketamine has a subtle psychological effect that really seems to resonate with some people. I guess this is why its connected to long term depression treatment. Unfortunately when combined with the other two factors I have listed, it becomes a trap into which people can fall for a long time. Especially the young.

It's basically halfway between marijuana and heroin. It's as destructive as that sounds.

For the record, I'm in favor of the freedom to use drugs, but ketamine is nasty stuff.

eyeJam• 11 years ago

I am reminded while reading this article, that there exists hundreds of thousands of "casual" cocaine users who are capable of using for short periods of time, even a single night, and then getting on with their lives. This is supported by statistics[1], but also my personal experience of knowing plenty of successful ambitious people who will occasionally take a weekend off and consume psychedelics, or MDMA, or split a gram of coke between friends for a night. In fact I think it's safe to say that the majority of cocaine users don't become regular users with expensive and costly habits. Of course no one ever writes lengthy exposés about the occasional users because that wouldn't fit the narrative that has been playing on loop for the last 40 years: "all drugs are bad and even one single use will lead to your ruin".

It's people who are suffering from mental illness or who live in conditions that cause them mental anguish who usually become addicted to drugs in general. It's a form of escape and the community that dulls their pain.

The sooner we can start having sane, even-handed discussions about drugs the sooner we can start solving the root of the problem, which is not drugs, but mental illness and mental wellbeing. Sensationalist stories such as this one that completely ignore >90% of drug users and focuses only on the ones' whose stories are worth exploiting for clicks are not helping.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jun/29/drugs-c... He cites 12:1, casual to addicted, in the USA.

dreamfactory23• 11 years ago

what does cocaine have to do with it?

titanomachy3• 11 years ago

I found the quality of writing to be somewhat sub-par for BBC, which is usually excellent. Very interesting story, though.

egypturnash• 11 years ago

Someday we'll find it The K-hole connection The ravers, the Chinese, and me.

mrottenkolber• 11 years ago

The writing in this piece is horrible.

"Free parties were popping up all over the country, and there were many in Bristol. That's when ketamine came flooding into the city."

Differentiation? Anybody? As far as I am concerned these so called "Free parties", aka outdoor raves, exist in most places of the world, as they cater for a basic human need to have a good time. Now when people enjoy themselves, they tend to drink, smoke and use various consumerables. We know Ketamine is big in the UK. Now how are non commercial social events connected to Ketamine?

jklein11• 11 years ago

Ketamine... just say neigh.

The Ketamine Connection

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