Amid a sea of ketamine therapy boosterism, I came across this article sounding the alarm. It's quite good, and I learned some wild things in it. Link bypasses paywall.
I wish that we could do things responsibly in this country. Psychedelic therapy offers tremendous opportunities for both sick and healthy people. It also comes with risks, risks that communities like us know very well. Now that their potential has been recognized, I feel that rather than pull in our expertise, profiteers are running full speed ahead heedless of the harm they are going to do.
Even basic things like recognizing that ketamine is addictive and can cause permanent bladder damage get ignored. It turns out that if you offer someone a lifesaving therapy that lasts for a week or two and costs pennies, but charge US$400 a dose, people will find a way to cut out the middleman. And a percentage of those people get hurt. I'm in favor of people having access to drugs, but when doctors with no training give you ketamine and don't inform you of the risks, that's not just irresponsible, that's malpractice. We saw what happened when pharma reps told doctors that Valium and Xanax were safe and not addictive, and then again with oxycodone. Ketamine is neither, but you would have hoped they'd learned.
On the larger scale, I'm concerned by the overpromising. We love doing that with new drugs. We did it with Prozac, we did it with Xanax, hell we did it with Viagra. Measured expectations don't get funding and they don't sell product.
I'm delighted that people are finally getting help, but I wish we had better community-supported spaces and containers for these tools. A generation plus of suppression has really made it hard to create the community capacity to meet all the need.