Actually the color inversion is probably a 'filter: invert(100%)' turned on by js; I tried peeking through the DOM and didn't see it, so I may be wrong.
If filter performance is an issue, they could force gpu rendering by applying a 3d transform that does nothing.
Knowledge is power, especially when it has to do with possible treatments for debilitating conditions. Good for them for stepping out of the conventional zone.
That sentence is very strangely put together. Of course knowledge is power? That doesn't mean this article wasn't visually annoying. Subjectivity, you know.
a) Yes, right, Knowledge IS power, but only when you know about it. Ketamine as a depression treatment is very under the radar. You can only empower people with knowledge once they have it to use.
b) You mentioned nothing about "annoying" or "subjectivity" -- you were being snide and unproductive with your "bloomberg talking about drugs jeez" comment, and I felt the need to respond and praise them for going outside of common bounds.
...and this is why journalism about drugs is often dismissed. Its incredible how bad the presentation is here. Its almost like someone with anti-drug views saw the article as too positive, but didn't have the science to contradict it, so they ordered it "hippie'd up" to ruin its credibility. Its working, because there's no way in hell I would share this article with anyone considering the presentation.
Even if we ignore my little conspiracy theory, my god, randomly going from black on white to white on black is inexcusable. What is this? A geocities page? Thank god for Firefox's reader mode. The web is barely usable nowadays.
I found this article pretty hard to read from the distracting animations, but I do like where the research is going on ketamine. Specifically, it's been found to be a good treatment for anhedonia[1], the loss of pleasure or interest in things you used to enjoy. Anhedonia makes life feel pretty empty, and it tends to improve very slowly even with treatment.
Frustratingly for the animators of this article, the view that ketamine is a club drug that can also fix depression is probably not going to do wonders for its legitimacy as a serious treatment.
I know several people who have tried ketamine, but in powder form. Have any of you on HN tried? I saw people doing it only once, and they seemed quite functional, though a bit inebriated. They said it was a very pleasurable high. I guess they were on low doses.
My main problem with street bought drugs is that you never really know what you're getting (I'm a chemist, seen my fair share of "white powders" during my training). I have argued with people countless times against their using substances of unknown origin. I'm really glad to see this available in a safe clinical setting. It's very mature.
I tried what seemed to me like a very small amount once. It was given to me by a friend who used it frequently so I felt comfortable with the source. To me it seemed pretty similar to pot. I found myself focusing a lot more intensely on the bass drum in the music (it just sounded so good!) but otherwise I was totally aware and functional; more so than I would be after even 2 or 3 beers. Granted it was a small amount but I definitely felt it. Woke up feeling totally fine the next day.
I've tried it twice in powder form, one at a regular dosage, one at a "k-hole" dosage.
The regular dosage is similar to getting drunk (the happy drunk stage), except that it's over in an hour. The k-hole dosage is a full-on psychedelic trip, also over in an hour.
Now that I've tried it, I probably won't bother again due to the detrimental effects of long term use.
Ketamine is a favorite drug of mine. It's pretty popular in the house/techno music scene, along with MDMA, LSD, and mushrooms.
At "micro doses," you just feel like you're in a really great mood--not really inebriated at all.
At low doses, it makes me feel very "silly." It's very fun to do with friends. You're all cracking jokes, laughing, making fun, dancing around. It's a dissociative, so it makes moving around and walking feel funny and novel. At low doses you are quite functional, though.
Normally, I might have a tinge of social anxiety, and be on the more shy or reserved end of the spectrum. More than any other drug (including MDMA and alcohol), ketamine completely does away with any anxiety. I presume this is what makes it therapeutic. All worries are gone...you feel light-hearted and whimsical.
At higher doses, the dissociative effect is stronger. This induces what is known as the "K hole." Ketamine is indeed a usable (and comparatively safe) anesthetic.
You come down after 40-60 minutes. There isn't any negative comedown effect...more of an afterglow. At this point, you can do some more and go right back up. Keep on doing this, however, and you will generate a short-term tolerance.
Ketamine is often diverted from veterinary supplies. You will get a liquid vial, which you can then heat up to dry it out into a powder. This is the best quality K you could hope to find. If you get it in powder form, it is likely to be cut with something...who knows what.
https://dancesafe.org/ is an organization that will test your drugs for you at an event. It was pretty cool to be able to buy some, take it over to their tent, and get it tested. The sample that I gave them tested positive for ketamine, but it did have something else that they could not identify.
Most of the time, users have to rely on feedback from others for a confirmation on quality.
I've tried ket, but at this point it's way too expensive. You normally pay 70 to 90 dollars for 10 to 5 uses depending on your tolerance and other factors.
It does help with depression but only temporarily.
I've also experimented with other drugs in the dissos category.
Namely:
MXE - Twice as potent, twice as long ketamine but a bit weirder. Currently one of the most popular dissosatives for the people who do research chemicals. I've used this heavily in the past for depression but it's lost it's effectiveness for me.
DXM - This drug always feels dirty to me, mainly because you have to take a bunch of cough syrup to get it's effects. You can get the raw powder but isn't really worth the hassle. Longer duration and unique feeling. Does help with depression but not worth it to me
MXP- Feels like cleaner DXM. Didn't really enjoy it, didn't really help depression.
MXM- Brand new, haven't tried it much, but really promising for depression in my eyes. Shorter then MXE, longer then ket, has a very unique feeling to it.
3-MEO-PCP - In my opinion this is the best for depression. you can't hole on it, and it ends up very stimulating. Basically mania in powder form. Generally people see the PCP in there and run scared. I will note PCPs in general are extremely hard to dose. Cheap scales can't normally do bellow twenty mg, and anything over 5mg can't fit on blotter. 3-meo-PCP doses between those two.
N2O - does work for depression, sort of. Way too addictive to be worth it, and honestly leaves you feeling sort of blah.
As for how you know what you're getting, you really don't. You rely on reputation and the crazy people who test these things.
This whole process started for me when a dose of ketamine basically transformed me from suicidally depressed to fairly normal and functional in one use. It's like a light switch flips and given that current depression drugs take weeks to start working I hope that they figure this out.
Not sure about now, but a few years back the problem with Ketamine in the UK was it was so cheap. About £5 /$7 for a gram. It was all getting shipped over from Indian supplies by the litre (err 4 quarts(ish)).
I hear now, after India cracked down, it got scheduled in the UK that prices are up and quality is down and mostly coming from China. Very little to none redirected from veterinary supplies for the UK market
There's been a lot of crack downs in China. Prices are about 70 bucks a gram on the darknet, and much higher locally. Local stuff is cut to shit to, and you'll likely never find liquid.
There are bunch more waiting to come out that I can't wait to try. MXE hole in the market still needs to be filled as it gets slowly banned everywhere.
Tried it as a pill, over the course of about 90 minutes started feeling what I can only describe as dreamy, and pleasantly spacey - almost abruptly the spaced out feeling dissipated and what I assume to be MDMA begin to take effect. It was a profound experience, and I wish there were more clinical studies [1] of these drugs which have an unfortunate stigma attached. Mornings after I've never felt too bad, and never felt urges of addiction, although I've certainly seen friends who've struggled with addiction but that is the case for alcohol and video games as well.
The problem with prohibition and black market drugs is the products are of unknown quality and origin, and there is a lack of education and understanding in regards to therapeutic dosages vs abusive dosages.
Luckily at the time, I was aware of sites [2][3] that allowed people to submit and comment on street E "brands" with reputed effects and suspected contents. Anecdotally, a few years later I came across the same brand/label/color pill and it was undoubtedly a different set of chemicals.
In retrospect, it was a life changing experience that broke through a blinding state of depression I had at that time, and acted as what I can only describe as a positive "spiritual" experience.
tbh the long term affects of ketamine make it the drug of the stupid , i spent a year on the shit partying and after stopping it have had to witness many of my friends continue to use and develop server health problems.
Most of them carry around there fluids and have to sleep on plastic sheets.
Ketamine seems a fun drug and unlike lsd lasts much less time but I've never heard of LSD destroying a persons bladder.
To be fair, the dosages most of these doctors are administering are well under a usual recreational dose, as the article mentions. IIRC you also build tolerance to ketamine pretty quickly, so I'd imagine the amount of K those people are doing that's causing bladder damage is a couple orders of magnitude larger than any of these patients.
LSD is as close to as harmless a drug, physiologically, as you can get--no one has ever died of an overdose on it, and there isn't permanent physiological damage that happens even with regular heavy use.
Agreed, not physically damaging. But it can destroy you mentally if used often and in heavy doses.
>but I've never heard of LSD destroying a persons bladder.
That was the quote I was referring to. Bladder in tact, but a shell of a person left with severe paranoia and mental problems.
Not to hate on LSD, but no drug is safe is abused daily.
The dosages used to destroy a bladder are very high, generally multiple times a day usage, and fully within the realm of addiction and severe abuse. That said, the fact that this is possible is concerning, but it is most certainly not the norm.
“We believe we can double the income of the average family physician or internist"
This sounds like a setup for badness the first time someone has bronchospasm or goes apneic when they push the full dose or aspirates their vomit. Probably not a good idea to go to your local FP or internist-- or anyone else not prepared to take over your airway for you-- for a ketamine treatment.
The full dose isn't pushed. It's on a drip IV over half an hour or more. But I fully agree that you should have a competent, experienced doctor doing it, preferably an anesthesiologist.
> Patients receive a low dose of the drug: about one-tenth of what recreational abusers of ketamine take or about one-fifth of what might be used as a general anesthetic.
This strikes me as odd - shouldn't the recreational dose be well below the anesthetic dose?
Even in the K-hole you'd like to retain some conciseness.
The effects the patients describe are pretty much the recreational effects.
And with ketamine as with other 'fun' sedatives such as ambien or quaaludes back in the day, one has to resist the urge to nod off for long enough for the fun to start.
I never had the urge to nod off with small doses of ketamine where I already felt some effects - it'd be a pretty bad anesthetic anyway if you could resist it by willpower alone.
Intramuscular/V vs insufflation is another factor. The dive into the rabbit hole is more acute in the former, and most recreational users will be snorting it. I believe studies have only shown injections to give antidepressive effects.
Because your citation does not refer to anesthetic use but to experimental treatment of depression/post-traumatic stress.
While the other replies to your comment right now refer to real phenomenons, I don't think any of the effects suggested would be extreme enough to explain a higher average recreational dose than anesthetic dose.
>The effects the patients describe are pretty much the recreational effects.
Except theyre not. Saying, "My ahedonia feels better today. I smiled at a baby on the street but am still otherwise a little melancholy," is a whole lot different than "Dude, I'm trippin' balls here!"
This is like the difference between taking an opiate to stop pain and taking an opiate to get fucked up. They are not the same effects. How a drug interacts with a sick person is going to be different than a healthy person especially when the doses vary. As a depressive, I never understood how much fun my friends were having on drugs. The effect on drugs on me was always very watered down. I have an unhealthy brain and that means typical means to get high aren't available to me.
/guy who has been on more anti-depressive treatments that he cares to admit
The immediate effects are actually the same as the recreational effects. But there's a "halo period" after the psychedelic effects wear off during which the world seems friendlier, safer, brighter. This can last weeks or even months.
Oh, and for the record, the crazy-ass geometric animations on the article are not that far off what I get when receiving IV ketamine and I close my eyes--although the real ones are far more complex and change constantly. However, the fear-and-loathing melty and color changing stuff is not something ketamine induces. What the page does not capture at all is horrible effects it has on sound. The visual stuff is pretty tolerable, but a simple fan ends up sounding like a helicopter, and most other sounds get very harsh. For me, having music is absolutely critical to getting through the whole process. I listen to a mix of various Bach performances, which gives the whole crazy trip some structure and narrative and keeps it familiar enough that I feel like I still have a handle on and am still grounded in reality, despite the strong dissociative side effects.
58 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadIf filter performance is an issue, they could force gpu rendering by applying a 3d transform that does nothing.
a) Yes, right, Knowledge IS power, but only when you know about it. Ketamine as a depression treatment is very under the radar. You can only empower people with knowledge once they have it to use.
b) You mentioned nothing about "annoying" or "subjectivity" -- you were being snide and unproductive with your "bloomberg talking about drugs jeez" comment, and I felt the need to respond and praise them for going outside of common bounds.
Even if we ignore my little conspiracy theory, my god, randomly going from black on white to white on black is inexcusable. What is this? A geocities page? Thank god for Firefox's reader mode. The web is barely usable nowadays.
But I kinda like them. They're so over-the-top goofy that I thought they were funny, in a "Reefer Madness" kind of way.
I'll send the article to my psychiatrist mom, anesthesiologist brother, and veterinarian sister, and I expect they'll get a good laugh out of it.
Frustratingly for the animators of this article, the view that ketamine is a club drug that can also fix depression is probably not going to do wonders for its legitimacy as a serious treatment.
[1] http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v4/n10/full/tp2014105a.html . Tested patients with bipolar depression also on a mood stabilizer, so there's lots more research to do.
My main problem with street bought drugs is that you never really know what you're getting (I'm a chemist, seen my fair share of "white powders" during my training). I have argued with people countless times against their using substances of unknown origin. I'm really glad to see this available in a safe clinical setting. It's very mature.
Now that I've tried it, I probably won't bother again due to the detrimental effects of long term use.
At "micro doses," you just feel like you're in a really great mood--not really inebriated at all.
At low doses, it makes me feel very "silly." It's very fun to do with friends. You're all cracking jokes, laughing, making fun, dancing around. It's a dissociative, so it makes moving around and walking feel funny and novel. At low doses you are quite functional, though.
Normally, I might have a tinge of social anxiety, and be on the more shy or reserved end of the spectrum. More than any other drug (including MDMA and alcohol), ketamine completely does away with any anxiety. I presume this is what makes it therapeutic. All worries are gone...you feel light-hearted and whimsical.
At higher doses, the dissociative effect is stronger. This induces what is known as the "K hole." Ketamine is indeed a usable (and comparatively safe) anesthetic.
You come down after 40-60 minutes. There isn't any negative comedown effect...more of an afterglow. At this point, you can do some more and go right back up. Keep on doing this, however, and you will generate a short-term tolerance.
Ketamine is often diverted from veterinary supplies. You will get a liquid vial, which you can then heat up to dry it out into a powder. This is the best quality K you could hope to find. If you get it in powder form, it is likely to be cut with something...who knows what.
https://dancesafe.org/ is an organization that will test your drugs for you at an event. It was pretty cool to be able to buy some, take it over to their tent, and get it tested. The sample that I gave them tested positive for ketamine, but it did have something else that they could not identify.
Most of the time, users have to rely on feedback from others for a confirmation on quality.
It does help with depression but only temporarily.
I've also experimented with other drugs in the dissos category. Namely:
MXE - Twice as potent, twice as long ketamine but a bit weirder. Currently one of the most popular dissosatives for the people who do research chemicals. I've used this heavily in the past for depression but it's lost it's effectiveness for me.
DXM - This drug always feels dirty to me, mainly because you have to take a bunch of cough syrup to get it's effects. You can get the raw powder but isn't really worth the hassle. Longer duration and unique feeling. Does help with depression but not worth it to me
MXP- Feels like cleaner DXM. Didn't really enjoy it, didn't really help depression.
MXM- Brand new, haven't tried it much, but really promising for depression in my eyes. Shorter then MXE, longer then ket, has a very unique feeling to it.
3-MEO-PCP - In my opinion this is the best for depression. you can't hole on it, and it ends up very stimulating. Basically mania in powder form. Generally people see the PCP in there and run scared. I will note PCPs in general are extremely hard to dose. Cheap scales can't normally do bellow twenty mg, and anything over 5mg can't fit on blotter. 3-meo-PCP doses between those two.
N2O - does work for depression, sort of. Way too addictive to be worth it, and honestly leaves you feeling sort of blah.
As for how you know what you're getting, you really don't. You rely on reputation and the crazy people who test these things.
This whole process started for me when a dose of ketamine basically transformed me from suicidally depressed to fairly normal and functional in one use. It's like a light switch flips and given that current depression drugs take weeks to start working I hope that they figure this out.
I hear now, after India cracked down, it got scheduled in the UK that prices are up and quality is down and mostly coming from China. Very little to none redirected from veterinary supplies for the UK market
Thanks for that level of detail, very interesting to read.
There are bunch more waiting to come out that I can't wait to try. MXE hole in the market still needs to be filled as it gets slowly banned everywhere.
The problem with prohibition and black market drugs is the products are of unknown quality and origin, and there is a lack of education and understanding in regards to therapeutic dosages vs abusive dosages.
Luckily at the time, I was aware of sites [2][3] that allowed people to submit and comment on street E "brands" with reputed effects and suspected contents. Anecdotally, a few years later I came across the same brand/label/color pill and it was undoubtedly a different set of chemicals.
In retrospect, it was a life changing experience that broke through a blinding state of depression I had at that time, and acted as what I can only describe as a positive "spiritual" experience.
[1] http://maps.org
[2] http://ecstacydata.org
[3] http://pillreports.net
It's not for me really, it just made me recede into my own mind and made me feel like I was looking down a tunnel out of my own eyes.
Then I spent an hour or so just cabbaged on the couch unable to really move much.
Doesn't seem like a party drug at all (to me at least) whereas something like LSD or MDMA is just bags of fun in many situations.
People sniffing it every day / all day and getting through the 5grams+
But hammering that much every day of any drug is not a good idea.
At the above+1 commenter, take LSD at high doses everyday and see what damage you do to yourself
Of course, your psyche might be another matter...
>but I've never heard of LSD destroying a persons bladder. That was the quote I was referring to. Bladder in tact, but a shell of a person left with severe paranoia and mental problems.
Not to hate on LSD, but no drug is safe is abused daily.
Plenty of times in my life I've done LSD and I learned pretty early on that it was pointless to try a dose the day after a previous dose.
It would just have very little to no effect on my mind and I would typically have to wait a few days at least before doing it again before it worked.
This sounds like a setup for badness the first time someone has bronchospasm or goes apneic when they push the full dose or aspirates their vomit. Probably not a good idea to go to your local FP or internist-- or anyone else not prepared to take over your airway for you-- for a ketamine treatment.
This strikes me as odd - shouldn't the recreational dose be well below the anesthetic dose? Even in the K-hole you'd like to retain some conciseness.
The effects the patients describe are pretty much the recreational effects.
And with ketamine as with other 'fun' sedatives such as ambien or quaaludes back in the day, one has to resist the urge to nod off for long enough for the fun to start.
While the other replies to your comment right now refer to real phenomenons, I don't think any of the effects suggested would be extreme enough to explain a higher average recreational dose than anesthetic dose.
Except theyre not. Saying, "My ahedonia feels better today. I smiled at a baby on the street but am still otherwise a little melancholy," is a whole lot different than "Dude, I'm trippin' balls here!"
This is like the difference between taking an opiate to stop pain and taking an opiate to get fucked up. They are not the same effects. How a drug interacts with a sick person is going to be different than a healthy person especially when the doses vary. As a depressive, I never understood how much fun my friends were having on drugs. The effect on drugs on me was always very watered down. I have an unhealthy brain and that means typical means to get high aren't available to me.
/guy who has been on more anti-depressive treatments that he cares to admit