DOSE:

100 mg

oral

Ketamine

(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

196 lb

Ketamine Stopped My Drinking

I find it hard to credit that a single experience with ketamine could change my life in such fundamental ways, and yet, somehow, it did. I'm writing this report so that others may experience the same benefits I did, and to give myself a place to reflect on what ketamine did for me.

Some background details are in order first. When I was a teenager, I experimented a fair amount with psychedelics and had largely positive experiences with weed, mushrooms, and LSD. However, it was a booze-centred culture, and these initial explorations gradually phased out; by the time I finished university, drink was my recreational chemical of choice, as it was for most of my social group. There's nothing especially remarkable about that, except that my relationship with alcohol was quite unhealthy: it was never an adjunct to a good night; it was the substance of the good night itself.

Over the subsequent 20 or so years, I guess it's fair to say I became a high-functioning alcoholic. To to the external eye, I was a success: perfect family, high-flying career, some public recognition in a small way. But for me, the only game in town was drinking whatever amount of booze it took to blind me to the black hole at the centre of my being. And I worked hard at it. Not necessarily every night, but at least three and usually four nights of the week had me drinking to the point of blackout. All it took was the sniff of a drink during the day, and it was off like a greyhound out of the traps looking for more.

By my late 30s, this routine had become unsurvivable, but I didn't seem to be able to get out of it. More by instinct than anything, I returned to some of my earlier explorations with other drugs. This started with mushrooms, but it quickly took in MDMA, cocaine, DMT, some of the more esoteric tryptamines, and pretty much anything else I could get. It didn't do much for my drinking, but I do have to say that getting out the emotionally immature headspace that booze cultivates did me a lot of good. I certainly felt that there was pleasure available in my life that didn't stem from obliterating my consciousness. The negative side was that I had now added MDMA and coke to booze as a prerequisite to feeling like a human.

The one substance I hadn't tried was ketamine. I'd always wanted to experience the effect of dissociatives, but for no principled reason I just never got around to getting any. Eventually, I did manage to order some, and it was just a question of finding the right opportunity to take it. This came when my family were away on a day trip and I had the house to myself.

As is always when I'm trying a new substance, I kept it vanilla: 100mg dissolved in warm water and made drinkable with orange juice. It wasn't nice; it wasn't horrible. While waiting for it to kick in, I put on some music and did some work. It wasn't long before I felt the effects: a distortion in my body map and dissociation from my bodily sensations--pretty much exactly what I'd expect from a general anaesthetic. Music seemed better, but nothing like how much better it seems on mushrooms. Overall, the experience was uninteresting: a bit like being pissed but without the cognitive impairment. To be honest, I couldn't really see where the recreational value of ketamine lay, if this was the nature of the trip. Over the next 1.5 hours, the experience peaked and wore off. I didn't see myself feeling an urgent need to try ketamine again.

Where things got strange was about 2.5 hours after dosing. I was sitting on the couch feeling slightly rough when I began to notice the sound of a breeze coming through the room from an open window. It seemed to be very ... poignant ... is the only way I can describe it. And though I felt a little poorly physically speaking, everything else felt richer in the same way as the breeze. It was like all these small sensations and observations that were previously closed off to me had somehow become available. This analogy will be unhelpful to anyone who doesn't get the technical details of normalisation, but it's like all the variables in my experience had, up to now, been on different scales: some were 0 to 1; others were 0 to 10; and others again were 0 to 100. Necessarily, changes in the 0 to 100 variables swamped the others. But after the ketamine, it was like everything got mapped into 0 to 100: the pleasure of a summer breeze was as rewarding as snorting a line of coke.

You know where this is going. That evening, for the first time in two decades, I just didn't want to drink. More accurately, I didn't want to get drunk. The impulse just wasn't there anymore: it wasn't playing on my mind, I wasn't trying to organise everything around getting a drinking alcohol. It just didn't make sense to me why I'd bother. It was the same the next day, and the next day after that. In the meantime, it was a pleasure just to sit in the garden and watch the dragonflies, or go for a walk, or anything really.

That was a month ago, and I've haven't meaningfully drank alcohol since. Interestingly, I've had a glass of wine with a meal and a beer with some friends, but neither propelled me into an evening of blackout drinking as they would have formerly. I'm starting to feel the old desires creep back a little now, as well as some of the old agitation, but I'll try another dose of ketamine and see what happens.

I've since learned about the anti-depressant and addiction-treating qualities of ketamine in medical trials, so I guess this explains my experiences from a pharmacological perspective. But from the inside, the experience was rich and transformative, more so, perhaps than nearly any other I've had. It's raised other problems: stopping drinking has made me see issues with my marriage and wider life that alcohol was concealing. But these problems were always there; I just didn't know it consciously.

All of this is specific to me and may not work for you. Moreover, ketamine is a powerful drug and possibly dangerous. But I have to be honest to my experience with it, and the fact it that it's the only thing that ever stopped the self-destructive cycles that have characterised much of my life. Make of that whatever you like.

Exp Year: 2020	ExpID: 114703
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 42
Published: Sep 3, 2020	Views: 1,321
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Ketamine (31) : Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), First Times (2), Alone (16)