Joseph Paramar, an associate professor at NYU Langone University and the lead author of the letter, sees the seizure trend as evidence of a growing demand for ketamine as a recreational option. He said ketamine is much more well-known today than it was in the 1990s, when it was largely confined to electronic dance music clubs.
Today, ketamine appears on popular TV shows such as HBO’s “The White Lotus” and is openly mentioned by celebrities as a groundbreaking mental health drug. Clinics offering ketamine drips have popped up across the country, and some doctors and telemedicine startups are prescribing ketamine in the form of lozenges for at-home use. According to other studies, recreational and Addiction Increased has.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of these are increasing at the same time,” Paramar said. “As things start to get popular, the idea of ketamine is introduced to people who have never used the drug.”
Ketamine has long been used as an anesthetic in hospitals and abused recreationally for its mind-altering properties. However, in recent years, it has emerged as a powerful and fast-acting antidote for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. A variant of ketamine called Supravato was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2019 as a treatment for severe depression, with the following conditions: Strict risk protocol To ensure patient safety.
Many patients are deterred by hurdles in accessing Spravato, and doctors who believe generic ketamine is safe and effective routinely prescribe it off label. Some see Supravat as an example of a pharmaceutical company seeking to profit financially by patenting a derivative of a compound known to be safe, while others advocate off-label ketamine. Some people have a mistrust of big pharmaceutical companies.
One of the authors of the letter, published in JAMA Psychiatry, said he received consulting fees from Janssen, the company that developed Spravato.
Paramar reported that he received no commission from the pharmaceutical industry and said he didn’t want to be overly alarmed, but was concerned about the purity of the ketamine people are getting illicitly. In the club scene in the early 1990s, he said, ketamine was all in vials stolen from veterinary offices. Now that it’s available in powder form, “you never know what’s in it,” he says. “My biggest concern is that someone will think that mixing in fentanyl is a smart idea.”
The study in the JAMA letter draws only tentative conclusions, nodding to drug testing and purity limits, and possible changes in crackdowns and trafficking methods that could affect the data. “As the number of non-medical uses continues to increase, alongside media coverage and therapeutic uses, prevention and harm mitigation efforts are needed to protect the public,” the letter concludes.
