Does anyone really enjoy Ketamine?

Try everything twice – except pegging. That’s always been my philosophy. 

I wasn’t going to make an exception for ketamine. Good things were all I’d heard about K. It was “the best drug hands down” as long as you controlled how much you took. A versatile drug without a hangover or a comedown, a bonding drug that you can keep topping up on all night.

With the way its price doubled in the last two years and the constant talk of a drought, K has something, something cool and louche and unconventional – that MD – smashed out at student union nights from Aston to Lancaster, doesn’t posses anymore.

There’s a widespread feeling out there at the moment that if you’re doing a party or an afterparty without K you’re not doing it properly.

So when I looked down at a little pyramid of glassy white powder heaped on the end of a key, I thought: go on then, ket me.

Walking without any feeling in my legs was a lunar ordeal, floaty and surreal. Cigarettes and beers were in my hand, then they disappeared. Did I drink them? I wasn’t sure.

I wasn’t sure about anything. I moved from the kitchen to the living room to the balcony where people smoked and wondered how I got there. I wasn’t sure. All I could feel was a heaviness in my stomach. It was like a block of trash being compacted and crunched together, over and over again.

That was my first experience of ketamine and my second experience a few weeks later was exactly the same. Ket filled me for fear. The high’s so short you’re always wondering if you have to take more. Then taking more makes you worry about tumbling down the k-hole.

Twice is enough for me, enough to know I don’t like it and to know I won’t be doing it again. Like lobster, or handjobs, or olives without pits, Ketamine is overrated and overrated by people desperate to be cooler than what they were at uni.

Ket doesn’t make you want to go out or chat or dance: it’s about the inner anxiety that churns away under your exterior and the nagging worry that your exterior is betraying that inner anxiety.

The dissociative aspects of K, the not feeling like yourself, the not being sure what’s going on around you, the not understanding where you are; this is why K advocates love it so much. But it just made me feel like an idiot.

Compare that to ecstasy. The lights and the music, more harmonic and meaningful then you’ve ever experienced, an unparalleled and – yeah I know this is lame – moving intimacy with friends and strangers. Ketamine takes you to the opposite place, somewhere shut off and enclosed, where everything is an astonishing farce of misperception.

It’s rightly cooler than MD right now – I’ve seen spangled guys in Hollister – but it doesn’t make it better.

People do Ket to prove that they’re older and more mature, to prove that they’ve moved to London and they know what Kitchen Season is. Ket might be the drug of the day but the reasons why we’re taking it add up to little more than a lie.