WHAT THE FUCK IS WEARABLE KETAMINE?

| DRUGS | Enter the future of k-holing

Ever since I tweeted this a few weeks back my DMs have been frothing with DJs in Berlin and other drug-nerd homies asking me: SIS WHAT THE FUCK IS WEARABLE KETAMINE? Well, my darling kundle kweens, that is a very good question, and since I love spelunking in the weirdest corners of the psychedelic scene, today I dropped a Motherboard story that investigates this intriguing device—and what it means for the future of k-holing. (Shoutout to my editrix Janus for letting me use this very circa-2006 VICE headline and lede-ing with a Berghain joke.)

OK so wearable ketamine is essentially a Bluetooth-controlled skin patch that lets you get low-dose ketamine infusions from the comfort of your couch, instead of having to shell out thousands of dollars to visit a ketamine clinic and do it under the supervision of a k-doctor. It’s ideally a way to expand who has access medical ketamine beyond the current pool of like, rich trust fund kids—while the device is still under development, the California-based company behind it is betting on FDA approval by 2026 which would potentially allow health insurance to cover it. And since the device will treat pain, the company is also claiming that wearable ketamine could help tackle the opioid crisis (more on this in a bit).

If you’re a dedicated k-head you should probably >> click over to the article << because I GO IN on some advance-level topics, like how ketamine treats pain and addiction through its effect on memory, as well as the difference between injecting k into your veins vs. muscles vs. skin. (TBH I’ve only heard of people shooting up ketamine recreationally a couple times—most notoriously this summer in New York when these queer fashion kids were popping ketamine-laced needles into their skin at renegade raves and calling it DOLL SPIKES… I still can’t get over this.) My drug dealer also told me that ketamine dehydrates you, which kinda sounded like bullshit to me, but an expert in the story described ketamine as a “very salty orange juice” and now I can’t stop thinking of all that OJ splashing around my brain.

Now I really want to tell you about all the stuff I had to leave out of the story because it was too complicated or weird or personal.

Someone on the Rave New World Discord asked me recently what I thought about using addictive drugs to treat other addictions, and I think that is the thorniest question at the heart of this story. It’s not a big secret that long-term ketamine use can result in all kinds of issues including kidney and bladder problems (you always hear about hardcore ketamine addicts pissing all over themselves). But there has been SO MUCH recent media hype around how ketamine-for-depression is the biggest medical breakthrough in 50 years since Prozac, and so many of my friends are self-medicating right now that it’s almost like: yeah maybe I’m addicted to ketamine but at least I’m not suicidal?

Still, the darker side of ketamine abuse has been weighing on me heavy this week because I found out that my friend from high school died last week from a ketamine overdose. The last time I heard from him, he invited me to a secret psychedelic festival in Northern California for Burner-adjacent Silicon Valley types—but only if I promised to never write about it. I was too stubborn to agree to those terms so we lost touch and I’ll never forgive myself for this.

A render of the wearable ketamine device (Image via Bexson Biomedical)

Now this wearable ketamine company is swearing that the device could be prescribed by doctors for pain instead of more addictive opiates. Company co-founder Jeffrey Becker is a researcher who has been studying ketamine for 20 years (and kind of looks like he’s in the psychedelic Illuminati—long fingers covered in rings, a refined and esoteric demeanor…) He said ketamine affects brain waves to allow areas to talk that usually don’t while also breaking pre-habituated thinking. “It creates a psychological distance from pain,” he said. “So pain is a signal, but not necessarily having a grip on your consciousness.” Then he started drawing connections to mysticism in a way that kind of tripped me out, and I wish I could share more direct quotes but my recording mysteriously cut out.

Anyway I’m thinking: is substituting ketamine for Oxycontin really a solution to America’s raging opioid epidemic, or just a form of harm reduction? So next I hit up Dr. Volkow, the director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), and told her to please give it to me straight—how addictive is ketamine, really? To my surprise, she said that NIDA doesn’t have good statistics on ketamine addiction because it is so rarely abused in America. (I was like, uh you need to meet my raver friends…) 20-30% of people who try opioids, on the other hand, get addicted.

She started talking about cannabis—another drug that was touted as a “solution” to the opioid crisis on its road to legalization in the 90s. But a recent study found that it lacks effectiveness in treating cancer pain, and last year FDA recently warned CBD companies to stop falsely marketing their products for pain and opioid withdrawal.

Then Dr. Volkow dropped this bomb quote on me:

“We idolize [drugs like ketamine and cannabis] as a panacea. It’s like a fairytale—we want to believe in the magical properties, and our brain rejects potential negative ones. Pain is very challenging to treat and saying this is the solution that this can address the opiate crisis is very naive and simplistic, it’s much more complex than that.”

So then I talked to the wearable company’s business guy, and asked him what concerns his investors had, and he said their #1 priority wasn’t abuse or addiction (oh please, don’t be naive!) but making sure NO ONE ELSE COULD GET ACCESS TO IT. “Unfortunately in healthcare, if you can’t get patent protection for something, there’s no market for it, and it’s something that inhibits a lot of innovation,” he said rather candidly. So this is one of the reasons why the so-called psychedelic revolution is unfolding via the medicalization path—which would allow devices like wearable ketamine to enter the health insurance industrial complex—rather than decriminalization and recreational use for the masses. (This is another profit-driven reason why many companies are more interested in developing medicines “inspired by” psychedelics than legalizing psychedelics themselves.)

Finally I just decided to call the dope dealer I met at an outdoor strip club a few months ago (loyal Rave New World readers might remember him from the Britney Spears autonomous zone post?). This dude is a hardcore opioid addict who literally DABS FENTANYL every other hour. We haven’t hung out in a couple weeks because I’ve put my pussy back under lockdown, and it turns out that he’s now trying to kick his dope habit by… guess what!… doing a lot of ketamine! TBH I thought he was gonna ridicule the concept of wearable ketamine but to my surprise he was intrigued. “Wait, you’re writing about this shit? That’s cool,” he said, sounding really ragged like he was on his death bed. “I could see this working for detox with naltrexone.”

So where does that leave us? There are a lot of really weird things about to hit the drug market soon that are positioning themselves as breakthrough treatments for depression, PTSD, addiction, and other mood or anxiety disorders. Wearable ketamine is one of them—but it is hardly the craziest. On the horizon: psychedelic nasal sprays, shroom CBD (aka Inocybe aeruginascens, a shroom compound that gives mental health benefits but takes away the risk of a “bad trip”), ayahuasca-like tongue strips, and weed that makes you skinny.

A lot of these innovations are driven by profit and patents, while also aiming to fill a giant gap in the market because existing drugs, like SSRIs, aren’t really working for many people. With the pandemic taking a steep toll on mental health—I think we’ve all cracked a little this year, yeah?—this gap is starting to look like a gaping k-hole void. What’s important is for us, as consumers / patients / trippers, to distinguish between medical breakthroughs and marketing.

In a recent Double Blind piece my friend Shelby wrote about the ethics of novel psychedelic drugs (no link because it’s print-only for now), a professor she interviewed said it best:

“The problem is the extractive system of capitalism that we currently live in… which is linked to the deeply embedded idea of monopolization as an en goal. This is what is making people sick in the first place. So it seems completely counterintuitive to deliver these revolutionary treatments using the same type of economic approach that is contributing to a great deal of mental distress to begin with.”

In other words, depression and addiction as afflictions of neoliberal capitalism—or what Mark Fisher called “the internalized expression of actual social forces”—will not be handily solved by kinda-wacky futuristic drug devices like wearable ketamine until we dismantle the rotting infrastructure at the root of these symptoms. Maybe the idea that we can trip our way into a new way of living is a strange and far-fetched dream—but hey, I’m sure someone once said that about wearable ketamine.

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PORTLAND AUTONOMOUS ZONE

This week I really wanted to go to Portland to report on the Red House, the eviction blockade that sprang up a few months ago as activists started occupying a house to prevent an Afro-Indigenous family from getting evicted. Barricades went up last week and the media went into a tizzy over antifa “stockpiling arms” and laying “booby traps”—they started calling it CHAZ Part II. Obviously, I was obsessed. Portland is the one city I didn’t get to hit during my summer of chasing autonomous zones, and the fact that this barricaded blockade is centered around both racial and housing justice also seemed like a fitting conclusion to the threads I’ve been weaving all year.

But real talk: I couldn’t swing it because the cost of travel and lodging was just too steep in comparison to the income I’m making from this newsletter. This isn’t a guilt trip (OK maybe mildly…) but only 0.03% of my total subscribers are paying to support this project. Everyone else is reading for free! Not sure how other newsletters are doing but this seems very bleak?! (The only way I was able to fund my previous trips to CHAZ in Seattle and other zones was through government stimulus checks.)

So this is my way of saying that if you can afford it, upgrading to a paid tier would be the best holiday gift ya girl could ask for. Happy holidays, see ya next week!