Are we all addicted to ketamine

It costs on average half as much as cocaine. Like cocaine, it can be snorted and has long been confined to techno party circles. And to establish itself in consumer habits, it even borrowed its name and was called “pink cocaine” in 2022. Today, ketamine is increasingly used recreationally in other contexts by young adults. Ketamine, which is highly useful for human and animal anesthesia—and highly regulated in this medical context—was recently thrust into the spotlight by Elon Musk, who claimed to be using it to treat his depression. In France, since 2019, esketamine, one of its compounds, has sometimes been used to treat resistant depression . READ ALSO Elon Musk and ketamine: what are the effects of this drug? But the hallucinatory effects of what is sometimes nicknamed Special K have been known since the 1990s: “It creates a distortion of visual and bodily perception, which can lead to dissociative states, or even out-of-body effects. What users describe to us is that they can see themselves from above. In large quantities, it can lead to K-Hole, which is a coma,” explains Catherine Delorme, president of the Addiction Federation. And its consumption is increasing in France. For her part, Joëlle Micallef, head of the clinical pharmacology and pharmacosurveillance department at AP-HM,