Thanks to ketamine's ability to produce a "rapid anti depressant effect", some researchers are heralding it as a "miracle cure" for treatment resistant depression and a host of other conditions, from childhood trauma to anxiety and more. Doctors are endorsing the treatment - and clinics and drug companies are looking to cash in.
But should they be paying closer attention to the history of recreational ketamine use in the UK, Hong Kong and Taiwan? The drug can be profoundly addictive, with an extremely high tolerance profile - epidemics of addiction were recorded around the world as far back as 2000, with horrific consequences for those ensnared by its hooks. Lest we forget, "heroin" was sold as a non-addictive to morphine, and Oxycontin was sold on the basis of it too being "non addictive".
About Zoe:
Zoe Cormier is an author, journalist, science writer, broadcaster and public speaker with an academic training in zoology coupled with an upbringing in the music industry. Her first book, Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll: The Science of Hedonism and the Hedonism of Science, was published by Profile Books in 2014, hand-picked by The Guardian as a “must-read science book”, and ranked as the 7th best book of 2014 by legendary record shop Rough Trade. Her journalism has appeared in the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, Nature, Scientific American, Wired, Vice, and more. She is the only writer in the world who can say with full honesty, "Rolling Stone magazine paid me to take acid" - and she is the only person who has posed naked for New Scientist.
ABOUT SEMANTRIX
Semantrix is an online educational platform and forum dedicated to exploring the entanglements between LANGUAGE, PERCEPTION and CULTURE - dedicated to discovering more about how language shapes our worlds - founded and hosted by Dr. Reanne Crane and Rosalind Stone.
Reanne is a philosopher of language. Her PhD (from the University of Kent, UK) was a multidisciplinary thesis: “Aldous Huxley’s Island Revisited: Psychedelics and the Semantics of Perception and Belief”. She has over twelve years of experience in linguistic studies and teaching, and has been researching and lecturing on psychedelics and language both nationally and internationally since 2014.
Rosalind is a psychedelic outreach consultant who turned to drugs from an English Literature background (BA at Oxford University, MA at King´s College, London). With 8+ years experience specialising in outreach for drug policy and science organisations, she is press officer for Breaking Convention. Recent projects have involved co-authoring reports and crafting campaigns for the CDPRG, a thinktank dedicated to evidence-based drug policy reform.
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