The diverse effects of ketamine, jack-of-all-trades: a narrative review

While users report feeling complete bliss on ketamine, consuming high amounts of this drug can produce effects similar to a near-death experience. In 2024, Rodriguez Arango and colleagues162 reviewed the evidence for the peri-operative use of ketamine and cancer recurrence. Despite promising preclinical and laboratory studies, evidence in clinical practice is currently lacking and the authors called for further, standardised research in this area to explore the potential oncological benefits of ketamine. Given its side-effects and potential for abuse, the exact role of ketamine as an analgesic, particularly in the outpatient or community setting is still unclear. However, it is becoming increasingly recognised that ketamine plays an important role in multimodal analgesia, particularly for patients in the perioperative period.

Ketamine Abuse Treatment

• The short- and long-term consequences of ketamine addiction can have a profound impact on your health, relationships, and quality of life, but recovery is possible with the right support.
• Bias could play a role, since the 5 studies by Liao et al. (2010, 2011, 2012, 2016, 2018) were based on the same sample.
• Ketamine addiction also makes it difficult for people to function as they normally do in their daily life and activities.

Extended use may exacerbate anxiety, depression, and psychosis, particularly in those with underlying mental health conditions. However, its use comes with significant risks, ranging from immediate short-term effects to Alcoholics Anonymous long-term health consequences. Contact DeNovo Recovery today to learn more about our treatment options and how we can support you in your recovery.

• At Allen Carr’s Easyway to Quit Drugs, we address addiction from a unique perspective—removing the perceived benefits of the substance.
• Supervised DetoxA medically monitored environment ensures safety and comfort during withdrawal, minimizing complications.
• In addition, the FDA now recognizes the antidepressant benefits of ketamine when it is combined with oral depressants.
• “It is vital we are responding to all the latest evidence and advice to ensure people’s safety and we will carefully consider the ACMD’s recommendations before making any decision.”
• The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that, when injected, lethal doses of ketamine begin around 11 mg/kg of body weight.

What are the effects of ketamine?

We offer onsite medical detox with continuous support and care to ensure a safe and comfortable withdrawal process. It can be hard to hide addiction or misuse of ketamine, even if someone tries to do so. Ketamine is a recreational drug that is taken in small amounts to help people relax and feel happy. When people take more of it, they look for a stronger, happy feeling, which can leave users feeling detached from reality or in a different state where their mind and body feel apart from everything around them.

Opioid addiction: Signs & symptoms of opioid abuse

“It’s not a case that we can just arrest our way out of the ketamine issue,” says Insp Plummer. Some of the families of ketamine addicts the BBC has spoken to want the drug reclassified as Class A. But this would also mean children caught in possession of ketamine could face up to seven years in jail rather than five. Putting ketamine in the same bracket as heroin and cocaine “may increase the stigma and make young people less likely to discuss their use and seek help”, warns Prof Ralphs. “The effects can wear off from about 40 minutes to just over an hour after taking it,” she adds. “If you want to keep those effects, then repeat dosing is required to continue them.” What makes ketamine especially dangerous is that lots of people, particularly young people, wrongly see it as a lower-risk drug, says Mrs Wilson of the WithYou charity.

John C. Umhau, MD, MPH, CPE is board-certified in addiction medicine and preventative medicine. For over 20 years Dr. Umhau was a senior clinical investigator at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the 1980s, Olney and colleagues107 identified intracellular vacuolation and mitochondrial lysis, or ‘Olney’s lesions’, relating to high-dose NMDA antagonist exposure. Olney and colleagues108 also noted that the immature human brain (from 6 months of gestation through to several years after birth) is especially vulnerable to apoptosis and neuronal death from NMDA antagonist or GABA-like exposure.

The diverse effects of ketamine, jack-of-all-trades: a narrative review

If you are tired of dealing with the effects of alcohol and ketamine in your life, please call for free at to learn more about rehab programs and treatment options. If you or someone you know abuses alcohol and ketamine, call for free at to speak to an addiction treatment advisor about how to seek help. Due to the challenging nature of chemically manufacturing the anesthetic, most illicit users obtain ketamine through theft from veterinary offices or the diversion of a prescription. Ketamine (also called Special K, Kit-Kat, Vitamin K, Super Acid and, simply, K) is a dissociative anesthetic that—as a legitimate pharmaceutical agent—continues to be manufactured for both veterinary and human medical use.

Types of Dissociatives, Addiction & Treatment

It most cases, seeking treatment to help you stop using ketamine may be the best choice you make. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic developed in the 1960s, initially used in medical and veterinary settings. It works by blocking N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in the brain, disrupting pain signals and producing sedation, anesthesia, and dissociation.

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In large enough doses, ketamine abuse brings on what’s known as the K-hole effect where users lose the ability to interact with their surrounding environment. Over time, the effects from entering this state can start to impair the brain’s cognitive functions to the point where it becomes difficult to communicate with others. Ketamine’s intended purpose works as an anesthetic for use during surgical procedures, which accounts for its classification as a dissociative hallucinogen. With frequent ketamine abuse, the drug’s ability to create a feeling disconnection from one’s body can cause residual effects in a person’s daily life. Over time, users start to feel detached or disconnected from the world around them, even when they’re not under the influence of the drug.

Additionally, when the user is temporarily paralyzed by the drug, they won’t be able to clear their airway, which can lead them to choke and potentially die from aspiration. The emergency and referral resources listed above are available to individuals located in the United States and are not operated by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). NIDA is a biomedical research organization and does not provide personalized medical advice, treatment, counseling, or legal consultation. Information provided by NIDA is not a substitute for professional medical care or legal consultation.

For example, in 2004, Porter54 published a case series of 32 pre-hospital adult and paediatric trauma patients treated by the British Association of Immediate Care Scheme (BASICS). Porter54 described ketamine as safe and effective for analgesia and anaesthesia in a mixed cohort of pre-hospital trauma patients, with no significant adverse airway effects and maintained blood pressure in patients with hypotension. Therefore, we also analyzed the results after excluding four of these five studies. As a result of this, finding (2) would change to “lower white matter integrity in right frontal and temporoparietal lobes” and/or finding (3) would not stand, depending on which articles were left out. Original studies about recreative ketamine use in which neuroanatomical measurements were performed, either structural or functional, were included.