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The relative dangers of combining alcohol and ketamine

Snapinho

Snapinho

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Joined
Aug 21, 2005
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Sorry if this is not in the right place. However, I think it's an important question to be answered.

As far as I know, not much is known about the dangers and effects of this combination. An acquaintance of ours passed away in his sleep (aged ~40) after having drunk half a bottle of wine and having done a few bumps of ketamine before going to bed. It wasn't made completely clear by the doctor who performed the autopsy that he did indeed die of the combination. However, as there are many people out there who do use both alcohol and ketamine together, I was wondering if there's any trustworthy data out there as to the effects of this combined use. I for one never combine these, and I don't see why I would either, but there's lots of party people out there who combine these two when going out and live to tell the tale.

Ketamine is an anaesthetic that doesn't slow one's heart rate and breathing (as much?) as other anaesthetic, while alcohol does depress one's CNS. The dangers of combining various CNS depressants should be obvious to the people here, but what are the specific risks of combining ketamine and alcohol? I'd appreciate it a lot if anyone could give me some worthwhile clues.

Cheers!
 
Ketamine and other aryl-c.h.amines have been known to greatly potentiate the inebriatibng (not neccesarily the depressant) effects of alcohol, so I'd not be suprised if the risk of e.g. nausea/vomiting went way up. But unless you friend died from aspiration of vomit, it'd be unlikely that combining the two increases the risk of "spontaneous" death...
 
Generally speaking, death by aspiration asphyxia is often readily identifiable by the medical examiner upon autopsy. Further, a 'suspicious' toxicological finding in concert with any remarkable evidence of aspiration-asphyxia is often sufficient grounds for an ME to rule the death as drug-related, overdose, etc. However, unless your late friend encountered an unusually thorough ME, or his case was complicated by some remarkable anomalous, a simple polydrug induced aspiration-asphyxia may not be cause.

Without more information about the case, any further conclusions are purely speculative. For instance, what was this man's health? Was he overweight, on any medications, past health-problems etc, etc. Do you know the specific results of the tox-report, or have access to the ME report in its entirety? Was he accustomed to drinking alcohol in such amounts (tolerance, etc)?

Certainly, people do abuse the two without major incident. Nonetheless, to be safe, when abusing drugs like ketamine; please NPO (aka, don't eat or drink anything in appreciable volume). Setting aside the potential ethanol interaction, 375ml of a liquid should not be imbibed before or when using ketamine in any setting.
 
From my own recent subjective experiences with this combination... i have found thatvketamine raised my blood pressure after drinking a significant amount of alcohol. but this was done 3 hours after taking a cap of GHB; which i could TRY to estimate to he around 2-5 mls...(it was a pop bottle cap not a spring water bottle cap which i have seen to he most common as the standard dosage method for this substance) )...anyways these experiences happened when the rebound effect of the later symptoma of GHB intoxication would have been happening. but they continued way past that, i took about 200-400mgs of ketamine and experienced much the opposote of respiratory depression as one might expect from substances which are classified as downers or that may have anesthetic properties.
 
negrogesic said:
Certainly, people do abuse the two without major incident. Nonetheless, to be safe, when abusing drugs like ketamine; please NPO (aka, don't eat or drink anything in appreciable volume). Setting aside the potential ethanol interaction, 375ml of a liquid should not be imbibed before or when using ketamine in any setting.
Click to expand...

I dont doubt this for one moment. Its just a troublesome issue that the damage ketamine does to the bladder with a lack of liquid. Somewhat of a catch-22.
 
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