A Whole New Kind Of K Ration (US Army To Use Ketamine)

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Winding Vines

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A whole new kind of K ration

December 3, 2004
www.wired.com

A whole new kind of K ration: If it's good enough for ravers, it's good enough for U.S. troops. That's the thinking, apparently, behind the Army's decision to test the animal tranquilizer ketamine as a way to soothe injured soldiers.

The drug -- known in clubs as Special K -- has been reducing partygoers to gurgling blobs for more than a decade. This year, the Army has been running final, phase III Food and Drug Administration trials on a quarter-dose nasal inhaler of ketamine to see if it can substitute for morphine.

"With morphine, the soldier's just gorfed, he can't do anything," said Col. Bob Vandre, of the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command. "With this, he can drive his truck, or shoot his gun."

Vandre said he knew full well that ketamine "had been snorted by people at rave parties" and that "it makes you kind of weird, sort of like acid."

However, he promised, the military's dose of ketamine would not have the same effects.

"It doesn't make you weird," Vandre said. "But it does reduce pain."

The ketamine snort is one of several novel treatments Vandre was showing to people at the conference. Further up the treatment-development pipeline is a temporary blood replacement. The magic ingredient comes in a tiny bottle, which is filled with small bubbles just 2 microns across. The bubbles in this dodecafluoropentane emulsion swell to double size when they get in the lungs. Once they flow to the rest of the body, the bubbles distribute oxygen more efficiently than normal red blood cells, Vandre said. Forty cubic centimeters -- just 8 teaspoons -- would be as good at delivering oxygen as all of the blood flowing inside a person.

"We've taken mice, drained out all of their blood, and replaced it with a saline solution and this," Vandre said. "They walk around like nothing's happened."

At least for a half hour or so. That's when the bubbles begin to lose their fizz, and the mouse needs its blood back.
Click to expand...

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65905-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1
 
""With morphine, the soldier's just gorfed, he can't do anything," said Col. Bob Vandre, of the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command. "With this, he can drive his truck, or shoot his gun." "

What?

"However, he promised, the military's dose of ketamine would not have the same effects.

"It doesn't make you weird," Vandre said. "But it does reduce pain." "

What?

I think they have morphine and ketamine mixed up here.

At best, low doses of ketamine make your fingertips ever so slightly numb. Low doses don't noticeably reduce pain. And neither do larger doses.

Infact, if you were injured enough to require morphine, ketamine couldn't possibly be effective at treating that same pain.

Not only that - but since when can't someone function on a 10mg IM injection of morphine? Give me a break.

Not to mention we're talking about alcoholic American GI's here. As if they don't have plenty of experience driving and preforming other tasks while intoxicated. I'm sure many of them would be going into battle with a machine gun in one hand and a 6 pack in the other were it up to them.
 
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With morphine, the soldier's just gorfed, he can't do anything," said Col. Bob Vandre, of the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command. "With this, he can drive his truck, or shoot his gun."
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ok. what kinda dose of k would he be getting....uh yea, driving on even a minimal bump, yea i can do it, would i want to no. woudl i want to after ive been shot and injured, and fleeing the emeny, of course., and shootin the gun, just be sure not to drop it. i dunno...soiunds a bit off


didnt they have ketamine on the field in 'nam, if i recall, i know they had moephine, but wasnt ketamine used back then too.

id sure like a lil bag of k, put my ass to sleep. quite the levels of meth in me now.
 
yea, i agree with davesoviet here. in order for ketamine to have the same anesthetic effect as morphine it'd have to be at high enough doses where it'd severely impair a person's coordination/mobility. maybe they're just seeking out this alternative so soldiers don't get addicted to morphine?
 
but ive also seem some bad k-whores...think tweeker, crackehead lifestyle attitude, and mentality, but these are k users..meh, each drug has a diff grip. still, if soldiers get addicted to morphine, and usin k instead, i see...then trippin out when a nice khole hits em. might not be that bad, kholed out as theyre evacin u from somewhere..completly olibiouls to whast goin on around u...i dont think ppl would LIKE the hole expereince, but i dunno....if its all in medical and combat supplies, youd THINK There wouldt be a problem with it in there....hell im on drugs what do i know
 
Wouldn't it be funny if this low dose of ketamine made the soliders reassess their idea of war being good while their in the middle of a battle? Aren't you a little bit empathetic on ketamine, wouldn't you not want to kill a person even if it was an emany soldier?
I don't know if it really would or not but it's kind of funny to think about. And I'm just stoned on vape.
 
I wonder when they'll start treating US soldiers some weed to relieve angry thoughts on the field..
 
this is the most rediculous piece of news ever

army guys sure are crazy

maybe they plan to give them K while giving them anti-muslim propaganda over the receiver? that might work :-S
*sigh*

I'm only joining the army if they promise good sized doses of LSD every time I go into combat.
 
Further up the treatment-development pipeline is a temporary blood replacement. The magic ingredient comes in a tiny bottle, which is filled with small bubbles just 2 microns across. The bubbles in this dodecafluoropentane emulsion swell to double size when they get in the lungs. Once they flow to the rest of the body, the bubbles distribute oxygen more efficiently than normal red blood cells, Vandre said. Forty cubic centimeters -- just 8 teaspoons -- would be as good at delivering oxygen as all of the blood flowing inside a person.
We've taken mice, drained out all of their blood, and replaced it with a saline solution and this," Vandre said. "They walk around like nothing's happened."

At least for a half hour or so. That's when the bubbles begin to lose their fizz, and the mouse needs its blood back.
Click to expand...


Did no body read that part? 8o That shit's more mental then using K instead of morphine! Mice with no blood!8o
 
They already give troops amphetamines why not dissociate them too so they don't see value in any human life. They just want to drug our soldiers into numb, tweaky, murder machines. I heard of 12 yr old child soldiers in Africa having a cut made on their temple and having cocaine and heroin rubbed in so they didn't see any problems with murder, rape and torture. In Israel it is ok to for troops to smoke weed to deal with PTSD. Morphine addiction was called the soldier's disease in the Civil War. A large percentage of troops were addicted to heroin in Vietnam. Everyone drank and smoked cigs in WWII besides taking amps. War+drugs go together like music+dancing. Why not replace their blood with something better while they're at it? Why not replace their brains with chips and hearts with pacemakers? As if war isn't dehumanizing enough.
 
So wait, let me get this straight...

Someone was able to drain the blood from a mouse and replace it with a saline solution? And they walked around like nothing even happened? Shouldn't this be some kind of scientific breakthough? I don't believe a word of it.

On the topic of give Ketamine to soldiers, what the fuck are they thinking?
 
i find it hard 2 beleieve that we could make something that does a better job than something in nature (on that scale) the reactions and protines involved in o2 transport are complex as anything...
 
Ketamine is used as a dissociative anesthetic...it would not surprize me if it was used to relieve pain while our soldiers are being sewed back together.

it tends to be used in kids more often though

it relieves pain without decreasing breathing8(
 
It's quite obvious that neither the writer or this article, nor anyone interviewed in this article, know anything about ketamine.

The best part about the quote regarding officers being able to drive a truck or fire a gun was that it was followed by the man comparing ketamine to acid...because when I think of substances that don't impair your judgement, ability to drive, capacity to use a firearm, or impair rational thought, LSD would be at the top of my list for sure (heavy sarcasm).

If anything, ketamine will impair judgement far more than morphine would. The only medical advantage that ketamine and other dissociative anaesthetics have over opiate/opiods is that they do not depress respiration as much as traditional anaesthetics. However, this really only begins to become an advantage if we're actually talking about full anaestesia, and if you're doing that on a battlefied, respiratory depression is probably the least of your concerns.

The only other two advantages that ketamine would have for soldiers is that a dissociative state might make it easier to kill, and might make a soldier more willing to execute orders that he otherwise might find morally objectionable. It also might make a fatally wounded soldier more able to accept his own mortality, more calm about the spectre of impending death, although assloads of morphine would also accomplish this.

Of course, I can see a serious downside of this as well: Ketamine and other dissociative anaesthetics can create an experience similar to the oft-reported "near-death" experiences. While someple find this experience spiritually enlightening, if you've just in a battle, seen people get blown apart, and gotten shot, the last thing you're going to want is to be injected with a drug that will make you lose contact with your body and feel like you're floating away....if people who take this drug in the quiet of their home sometimes think that they've died, how does the army think that a wounded soldier on a battlefield is going to interpret it.

Overall, though, the Pentagon has been known to consider all kinds of dumb plans. I actually don't blame them, because out of a thousand dumb plans, occasionally you get one that saves lives. After all, using superglue to patch wounds probably sounded like a dumb idea, but it saved lives during Vietnam. The tank and the gas mask probably looked fairly silly in WWI, but they were quite useful. I can't see this particular plan ever actually gaining fruition, though....which is kind of a shame, since obviously these nasal inhalers would be diverted to recreational markets, and they sound kinda cool.

The blood replacement thing sounds interesting, but it also sounds like an embolism waiting to happen
 
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