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Counteracting side effects of ketamine (ab)use

I

incognition

Bluelighter
Joined
Mar 25, 2010
Messages
181
Location
Germany
I been partying hard for some weeks here in south east asia where ketamine bottles are available at the pharmacy. Theres something with ketamine making the body produce excessive amounts of stomach acid. I tried to counteract this with antacids, ginger and god knows what with no luck. Slowly i builded up stomach pains which i think is the same as the infamous k-cramps. Awful. I stopped taking ketamine for 2 days and got better, but not good.. until.. i found it. THE SOLUTION.


Add 1-2 teaspoons of baking soda to your litre bottle of drinking water.
Thats it.


Stomach functioning properly, feel no weirdness in the renal system which has happened before.
I'll update if im wrong. I will now abuse ketamine in the name of science for some more days before returning home to the west.

Your thoughts on this? Am i delusional? ;)
 
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Baking soda, a.k.a bicarbonate also prevents the renal issues associated with heavy ketamine use.
There is a link between bicarbonate and the kidneys. Helps maintain acid-base balance :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renal_physiology

Im not a doctor, and have no intentions to be. So i cant explain in detail what happens, but it do work. Would be interested what others, who knows more about physiology, has to say.

Keep taking the baking soda a week after stopping doing ketamine - until theres no more metabolites.

Anyway, here i serve you the solution to ketamine side effects. And i'm not going to do it again. I have other things to do. Go get your bladders removed and/or lie in fetal position with stomach cramps on the floor. I don't mind. ;)
 
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You should be careful about saying that, to much is not a good thing, from what I remember you don't really want to pass a couple of teaspoons or maybe tablespoons, also must always let it fully dissolve before drinking it. Lastly I wouldn't take this as a miracle cure or anything, that's to say I wouldn't pound ketamine simply because you found this, though i'm sure you probably realize that but HR and all that....!
 
This is interesting, since I just read on the other thread how ketamine is a fairly strong acid and that's the reason it's so harmful when used frequently. I've never used K myself but I'm a heavy user of MXE and 3-MeO-PCP and have been noticing a lot of GI problems since I started using 2 years ago; acid reflux type symptoms, heartburn etc. to the point that I've been a bit worried about my health. These symptoms have subsided a bit since I changed my ROA from sublingual/oral to rectal but they still occur. Haven't noticed anything bladder/kidney related though, just my stomach.
 
I thought it was the metabolite dehydronorketamine that was an irritant like similar enones? And that K-pains are more usually colic spasms of the gallbladder...

I have never heard about ketamine being associated with metabolic acidosis so it would seem strange to me if it was that acidic itself and that you could just neutralize it. Then again ketamine could cause dyspepsia, who knows, if you take it orally which is a weird thing to do anyway IMO.

Err so I'm pretty skeptical.

edit: I'm also probably wrong since I have faith in sekio's judgement:
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/540593-Ketamine-kidney-and-bladder-issues
 
I found one post on another forum where a guy recommended baking soda against k-pains. Besides that, i don't know more than it worked for me, but we sure need more people to try it out before drawing conclusions. And at usual, it might be individual. Lets see.
 
Incognition, let me rephrase what you just said:

You have been abusing a drug to the point of getting serious physical symptoms and rather than taking the hint of your body you invented a cure for the warning symptoms?

Ketamine is hard on the kidneys. You will be ingesting high amounts of sodium, whuch turns to salt, upsettiung your body's acid/base balance, and this has the following effects:
Ketamine is dehydrating. The salt willl make it more so.
Sodium Bicarbonate leads to excess Sodium in your electrolytes balance. You are basically taking 1-2 teaspoons of salt in a day and you mostly lost potassium, not sodium upsetting the balance further.
Sodium Bicarbonate leads to alkaline urine which makes resorption of alkaloids, the metabolites of ketamine, even greater, increasing the amount of K metabolized to the irritant enone dehydronorketamine
Sodium Bicarbonate leads to salt leads to extra stress on your kidneys.
Sodium Bicarbonate leads to increased production of gastric acid in the long run, leading to worsening of the condition you took it for.

First off, curb your usage of Ketamine until it no longer causes symptoms.
But, if you instead want to medicate the acid reflux:

-Stop using. A nobrainer but I thought I should mention it. Stahp.
-Take a multivitamin every day, not just for recovery.
-Fill your liter bottle with half fruit juice, half water to replenish fluids and potassium without overloading on sugar.
-Take a proton pump inhibitor drug like generic Omeprazol for the acid reflux, in SE Asia you can likely get these at the pharmacy without a script.
 
Thank you for your input. :) But sometimes the show must go on. Its just a temporary solution to keep going a bit more..ok? :) I'm home and off the K now. I saw someone else mentioning omeprazol before, yes.

But you know, i know my body quite well, and i started to feel really good in general when i started the baking soda thing. I dont think i was upsetting the acid/base balance, but instead counteracting the inbalance ketamine induced. And, it goes without saying (i think) you have to drink a lot of water in general if you are into this stuff.

And, im sure you know as well as me that theory and reality differs quite a bit sometimes. With all respect, i dont buy your reabsorbtion of irritating metabolites. It makes no sense as i feel my renal system is tip-top, and it should not really be, as i after every other bender felt minor problems, except for now, and it was the worst one ever. :)
 
You don't have to buy "my theory", its actually established pharmacology.

If you dump alkalinity into your stomach it gets neutralized by acidity in your stomach. Your body then has excess alkalinity, and 1-2 teaspoons of baking soda will definitely do that. Your body will try to restore pH balance by dumping the alkalinity with the urine, making it more alkaline. If urine is more alkaline, alkaloids in that urine will be present more as their freebases, and freebase alkaloids are resorbed in higher concentrations by the bladder wall and the urogenital tract. Next time you take amphetamines, if you take them with your 1-2 teaspoons of baking soda you will notice it gets you higher for longer. This has gotten cyclists killed in the Tour De France in the era that amphetamines and alkalinization were used as doping methods. Now before you do this with MDMA be warned that most MDMA metabolites, the sickening and more neurotoxic ones, will increase too because they are excreted in lesser amounts causing more passes through the liver causing a higher percentage to be more extensively metabolized.

Same thing with Ketamine, Ketamine is mostly metabolized as:

Ketamine --> Norketamine --> Dehydronorketamine (the enone alkylating irritant)

So the more hepatic passes you give Ketamine, the higher the percentage of drug that will be metabolized into DHNK.

It makes no sense as i feel my renal system is tip-top
Click to expand...

And thalidomide is a drug that feels rather clean and is in fact recreational as a sedative. How you feel is less important than the underlying science, which might catch up on you in the long run.

I didnt intend disrespect, and did in fact offer you a better way to treat your condition.
 
This is semi off-topic, but also will be useful to you. To help your brain you should consider taking a small amount of a serotonergic psychedelic such as LSD (from this article it seems to say that benzos work too, but I haven't heard that and wouldn't want to confirm, but worth looking into). This is to help with the potential brain damage associated with olney's lesions, you can read more about it here (I know wiki is always a bad source but this article seems well written, and you can always click on the sources and read the info there):
 
Olney's lesions aren't proven to be produced with ketamine and there are also doubts that you can compare studies done on animals with different metabolism, if making such claims isn't premature then at least IMO trying to take measures against it is. I think the more important disruption of the CNS / consciousness is from the NMDA antagonistic action messing with cognitive functions causing issues with planning (navigating time and space), language such as stuttering, and memory. Issues that are reversible though it might take a while. AFAIK serotonergic psychedelics don't help with this and instead either add to the potential derealization / depersonalization and/or the tolerance will make it non-practical for heavy users.
Maybe instead of LSD something like ergoloid (hydergine) would be better since it is not psychoactive in the same way. Adding psychoactivity just seems asking for complications...

Having a history with serious dissociative use (been able to moderate for 1.5-2 years now) I applaud suggestions that may help with harmful side-effects but I think Asante has a good point that I would like to emphasize: cut down on your use, get help if you need to because this really is a sign that demands action and change. Harm reduction is the big thing here yes, but if this measure of adding bicarb is used to justify further use that isn't harm reduction. I get having a monkey on your back, but you need to ask yourself if you are ready to contract organ damage.
 
Asante : I wanted to discuss and get input from people with more knowledge, hence the thread. Many good points in the thread in general. But just one thing, i feel you might exaggerate the danger of baking soda. There's almost cults based around baking soda if you know what it mean, its hailed as a miracle drug and people use it for all sorts of things, probably many of them pseudoscientific or what to call it. Just thinking you would hear more about this terrible substance if it is that dangerous ;) Though, i admit limiting the intake is important as when i started to use this method i used way too much and felt a sign of alkalosis - tingling in the extremities.

Anyhow, my idea was that most of the nasty side effects from ketamine comes from it being acidic, and it makes sense trying to balance this. I will keep taking small amounts of baking soda when im on my ketamine benders, though, i will try to find the smallest effective dose after reading the warnings here. Yeah, thats harm reduction too ;)

The warnings might be more adequate for people with chronic addiction, more than me just trying to keep my benders going for a couple of more weeks.
 
Sumph said:
This is semi off-topic, but also will be useful to you. To help your brain you should consider taking a small amount of a serotonergic psychedelic such as LSD (from this article it seems to say that benzos work too, but I haven't heard that and wouldn't want to confirm, but worth looking into). This is to help with the potential brain damage associated with olney's lesions, you can read more about it here (I know wiki is always a bad source but this article seems well written, and you can always click on the sources and read the info there):
Click to expand...

Why exactly does this help? I know why GABAergics are theorized to work, but why serotonergics? I frequently combine my dissociatives with serotonin inverse agonists (I loathe the stimlulation), would this have the opposite effect and increase toxicity?

Maybe I should be more worried about the GABAergic inhibition caused by the hundreds of milligrams of synthetic cannabinoids I smoke on top of my (now almost daily) dissociative use...
 
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Solipsis said:
Olney's lesions aren't proven to be produced with ketamine and there are also doubts that you can compare studies done on animals with different metabolism, if making such claims isn't premature then at least IMO trying to take measures against it is. I think the more important disruption of the CNS / consciousness is from the NMDA antagonistic action messing with cognitive functions causing issues with planning (navigating time and space), language such as stuttering, and memory. Issues that are reversible though it might take a while. AFAIK serotonergic psychedelics don't help with this and instead either add to the potential derealization / depersonalization and/or the tolerance will make it non-practical for heavy users.
Maybe instead of LSD something like ergoloid (hydergine) would be better since it is not psychoactive in the same way. Adding psychoactivity just seems asking for complications...

Having a history with serious dissociative use (been able to moderate for 1.5-2 years now) I applaud suggestions that may help with harmful side-effects but I think Asante has a good point that I would like to emphasize: cut down on your use, get help if you need to because this really is a sign that demands action and change. Harm reduction is the big thing here yes, but if this measure of adding bicarb is used to justify further use that isn't harm reduction. I get having a monkey on your back, but you need to ask yourself if you are ready to contract organ damage.
Click to expand...

You obviously know a lot more than me about this, I just wanted to throw in my 2 cents as it were because I had noticed it hadn't been mentioned. I have heard that the olney's lesions are questionable, but still thought it might be good just to make the OP aware of it, sorry anyway.

Toz said:
Why exactly does this help? I know why GABAergics are theorized to work, but why serotonergics? I frequently combine my dissociatives with serotonin inverse agonists (I loathe the stimlulation), would this have the opposite effect and increase toxicity?

Maybe I should be more worried about the GABAergic inhibition caused by the hundreds of milligrams of synthetic cannabinoids I smoke on top of my (now almost daily) dissociative use...
Click to expand...

I'm afraid I can't help any more than what I have said, but I have heard this from a few sources. I'm a chemist as opposed to a pharmacologist (at the moment, I hope to eventually get involved with that side of things), so only vaguely understand the reasoning, the post was more to get the OP to read into the dangers related to ketamine abuse..
 
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