Once-taboo ketamine booms for US at home mental care

Once-taboo ketamine booms for US at home mental care

WASHINGTON: Americans are paying to get a star of the psychedelic medicine movement — ketamine — shipped to them for at-home mental health treatments that are being called both a breakthrough and a gamble. A pandemic-spurred easing of prescription rules helped fuel a jump in telemedicine offerings of ketamine, an anesthetic that was once a taboo party drug but has become a buzzed-about tool against depression. Yet long-term, large-scale studies of ketamine’s medical impact are limited, leaving some experts concerned that an unregulated online boom could result in mishaps or a regulatory crackdown.

“This has to be rolled out slowly,” said Boris Heifets, a Stanford University assistant professor of anesthesiology. “The risk is that we are scaling the fix but not the solution, which is a much more integrated approach to mental health.” Ketamine has been available in the United States since the 1970s as an anesthetic called a “dissociative” because of the hallucinogenic effects that have helped make it a rave culture drug. It’s legal for US doctors to prescribe, while some other psychedelics getting renewed attention for mental health uses like LSD or MDMA (also called ecstasy) are classified as having no medical utility and a high risk for