Ahh, the triannual ketamine intrinsic brand difference debate surfaces again. OP, this isn't directed at you really, it's meant to anticipate and address all the various claims I've heard over the years about this issue:
Here's the gist: A synthesis that doesn't make use of any chiral substances won't produce a chiral product. That means that if ketamine is synthesized without using any chiral ingredients (which cost extra), then the product will be a racemic mixture, which is a mixture of equal amounts of R and S. Beyond that, even in India certain standards of quality most be adhered to by legit pharmaceutical companies, so it's all basically the same stuff.
It costs extra money to make higher or lower than the standard 50:50 R/S, so there's no reason to suspect that different brands have different ratios unless they market that fact. If a brand has more S they advertise it, like Ketanest S does. Ketanest S is the ONLY brand I've ever seen anything beyond user's conjecture to support the idea that a particular brand is intrinsically different than another. Show me a proper analysis or a company release regarding the contents of different brands. How many years (decades?) has this debate been going on and we still wonder why something semi-official and not difficult to obtain hasn't shown up proving that there are in fact numerous different isomer ratios circulating? The absence of good evidence should tell us something. I'm guessing the reason it continues is because dealers have a profit motive for supporting this myth. If nobody knows which brands have different isomer ratios but many different ratios are in fact on the market, well then, the one they're selling has the ratio/effects you want.
Why rely on subjective testimony when there's no reason we should have to and experience is extremely fallible? Unless you get a custom synthesis or Ketanest S, there's no reason to believe that uncut ketamine isn't the 50:50 R/S. Also, the size of the crystals is meaningless, as it can be attributed simply to the rate the liquid was evaporated. The only other intrinsic difference is concentration, with some vials having 100 mg/mL and others 50 mg/mL. Obviously that can make a difference if you're IMing!.
The reason people think one brand is qualitatively different than another is most plausibly attributable to the tendency to buy a small amount of a particular brand and finish it over a short time period. Psychological and physiological factors co-occurring with the time period of use color our experience of the brand even though it is intrinsically no different than other brands. I believe this thoroughly and even I have found myself preferring one bottle over another. Only in the past couple of years have I had steady access to a single brand, and over that time my friends and I have had radically divergent experiences with it at the very same dose.
Psychological factors are much less salient than brand name or label colors or vial shape, and so we naturally tend toward these overt visual cues when searching for an explanation (there are reams of psychological texts documenting this heuristic). From there on expectation bias and social conformity bias result in self-fulfilling prophesies regarding K brand quality. We do this because we want to be able to exert control over our drug experiences, but more often than not we're in fact cheating ourselves, because it means if we don't get THAT ONE special type of K we won't enjoy the experience as much.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
