Ketamine should be illegal: this is controversial.

yes you you've been looking uh in some
depth at this latest bizarre situation with the use of uh that heavy sedative uh uh drug um yeah there's a there's a great uh a great movie armageddon america has to send up some uh people to blow up an asteroid that's coming in to destroy the country and it turns out that our astronauts are just not equipped to go and drill on this uh asteroid and and so they go to the they go to bruce willis mining crew and one of the uh one of the men and his crew is this giant guy who's really just huge and he's sort of a wild guy there's many of the many of these uh uh miners are who who are digging around around the world under bruce willis at least and um and one of the things that they find you know this man can't go into space he's taking uh a uh a horse pill a horse sedative ketamine faith fail impressively failed one toxicology analysis revealed ketamine that is a very powerful sedative sedatives are used all the time doctor well this one's used on horses some of these guys are pretty big and um and bruce says well he's a big guy you know he's a big guy and it's so funny my colleagues now are pushing ketamine for depression tell us that's that crazy story yeah so i i mean this is fascinating and again starts in your crazy country so so uh so so some people started opening clinics and giving people injections of iv ketamine um sometimes this was done in a sort of psychotherapeutic way with the idea that you know you'd have this sort of mind-altered experience you'd do it with in conjunction with a therapist i think ecstasy and lsd are also being used this way and that maybe that would you know enable people to deal with you know past trauma or get over some anxiety um so so that was the way it started and then ketamine clinics start up where people go back and they keep getting regular sort of fixes um so uh so that became popular then jansen developed um an inhaled a nasal inhalation version of ketamine which which is called s ketamine but it's just as strong as ketamine in fact and people and the process with that is that you go in and you inhale your ascetimen three times a week and then you're observed afterwards uh to make sure that you're um you know that you're physic you know you're not physically in danger in any way uh and then you're let out of the clinic and then you come back again um so eschetamine has was recently licensed by the fda uh for this three weekly um this three weekly mode of administration and has just been considered by the european medicine agency and the the uk medicines agency so normally the fda has to have two positive trials but of the three trials of acute um treatment for uh treatment resistant depression it's being marketed for of those three trials only one was positive the other two weren't positive at all so then they had then they they roped in a relapse prevention study and they found some positive findings in that so then they said okay we've got our two studies although they don't usually use a relapse prevention study so they license it on the basis of this one positive acute treatment study in this relapse prevention study um what they failed to say uh they skated over the fact that two of the studies were negative they also failed to highlight that there was a huge placebo response across all the studies obviously if you're getting people in um you know to do the slightly odd procedure and then giving people lots of attention and care afterwards there's going to be a placebo effect and and most worrying of all what they skated over was that actually there were a lot of potential worrying effects associated with the ascetine so there were several deaths in the ascetamine group none in the placebo group that's very i didn't know this yeah very unusual joanna yeah yes exactly in a drug trial it's it's almost unheard of because you know healthy people don't you yes so so there was a heart attack there was a road traffic accident um and a number of other incidents like that and there were three suicides all in the ascetamine group all after um shortly after cessation of the eschetomine so quite probably associated with the down that you get uh following the high that you get with a with a recreational drug like eschetamine and i think the other thing it just highlights to me is the way that psychiatrists and researchers and drug companies are able to do this sort of double speak so we know that ketamine is something that makes people high you know gives people it puts people into an altered state that some people enjoy some people don't enjoy it but some people enjoy it clearly it's a you know recreation drug um but it's extraordinary how these researchers are able to talk about that high as an antidepressant effect you know that they which you would get with any you know if you give someone heroin or cocaine and you measure their you know you do a depression score a couple of hours later of course you're going to show an antidepressant effect if that's how you want to talk about it um that is the same thing that the criminal electroshock doctors do i've read so many charts in regard to electroshock treatment when i've been product liability suits i've been still involved in big product liability suits here in the us bowel practices the patient after one or two treatments tends to get euphoric from brain injury it's brain damage euphoria and the doctors write in the uh uh always write a positive remark in the chart such as mood elevated yes yes yes never do they write you for artificial high euphoria brain damage we better stop the treatment it's quite sick sometimes they talk about um tipping people into mania don't they they call it mania um yes which is another way of sort of blaming the disease blaming the condition and and you know enabling yourself to ignore the harmful effects of treatment the other extraordinary thing about that about ect and that euphoric effect which i've seen i've seen several times in my class as a doctor it definitely occurs i don't think it occurs with everyone but it definitely does occur it tends to turn into apathy eventually all brain damage my experience usually leads to apathy not a permanent eye yes yes absolutely but as you say immediately what you get is this state of euphoria but it's it's a distinctive state of euphoria where people are um sort of silly and disinhibited in in you know in in ways it isn't quite the same as just you know if you gave someone a big shot of cocaine or something it's not just pure euphoria or heart no there's more injury in it than mary is going and exactly yeah yeah and so it definitely occurs but it's very difficult to find reference to it in the literature isn't it in the published literature right i found it enough so that i've got it in in you know my first book in 1979 on electroshock and in my papers but you got yeah yes absolutely yes and very very little recent acknowledgement you have to go back a long way don't you when people were a bit more honest when they brought these things in well you know before i wrote my shock book in 1979 they're very honest about how people thought they were dying on shock treatment people had rebirth experiences and how people did it because they hated themselves i mean there's all kinds of stuff but once i started quoting them they really cleaned up their published act unfortunately joanna can you say a little more first you're educating me marvelously and the audience about ketamine and um say some more about what is the what what is ketamine nearest two with drugs we're more familiar with so it's a strange drug um it's uh so it's used as an anaesthetic and it's a muscle relaxant um but it it also seems to have a slightly uh stimulant some stimulant properties and um and a slightly hallucinogenic quality to it so people get this state people it's referred to in the literature as dissociation do people get sort of you know have this sort of out of body experience yeah which is considered in the dsm of course a dis mental disorder yeah it's actually very very common and and a lot of people get it from stress or yes yeah yes normally so it causes a dissociative process yes um where you're separate from yourself your body yes the world around you and people um get sort of tunnel vision and uh really get i mean a bit like the sort of amphetamine folk you know the narrowing of focus with amphetamines people get into it's called a k hole get into this sort of they get this sort of tunnel vision where they're just focusing on you know or not not really really oblivious to their surroundings and focusing on a bit of the floor or something like that um that's very very very helpful strange it's a strange drug um addictive i mean we know it's addictive right yes yes it i mean again again it's a bit like stimulants i think not not not so much like the opiates or benzodiazepines so the come down is um the main feature is this depression crashing crushing yes crushing of course yeah it's a mixed sedative stimulant it's an unusual drug very interesting i think the the verdict now has to be and and you'll see a good review of it in my book psychiatric drug withdrawal that all classes of psychiatric drugs probably all classes of psychoactive substances will shrink brain tissue their neurotoxins they poison their functions and one of the first things to go are unfortunately our very highest centers up to 60 million americans are estimated to live with depression of them one in three don't respond to available treatments enter this nasal spray in what's considered the biggest breakthrough drug in the battle against depression since prozac the food and drug administration this week approved the use of escadamine with the potential to deliver nearly immediate results a lot of the antidepressants that we're used to such as zoloft prozac alexa pro takes four to six weeks to work escadamine works in a week and that's very exciting marketed under the name spravato the spray is a derivative of the popular drug ketamine popularly known in the 1980s as special k that's right ketamine is now being prescribed to patients in the united states with treatment resistant depression these are patients who have tried all the different psychiatric medications that their psychiatrist has thrown at them and they still feel depressed so what are they going to do they're going to take ketamine you might think that i would be surprised by this but i'm really not because i grew up in the 90s i saw this transition from marijuana being seen as a party drug to marijuana being seen as a medicinal drug something that can be prescribed to you by a doctor americans everywhere are turning to cannabis seeking relief from a wide range of ailments including veterans like sean worsley who uses cannabis to treat his post-traumatic stress disorder caused by combat in iraq shawn's medications for ptsd had troubling side effects so he got a medical cannabis card cannabis at a low dose can help reduce anxiety relax someone and individuals who have ptsd that newly initiate cannabis use report it being life-changing so this is partly not surprising to me because i've seen how this cultural shift has happened in the united states from seeing cannabis as a party drug to now having cannabis seen as a medicinal drug but an additional reason why i am cynical about this and why it's not really surprising to me to find out that the fda has approved ketamine for treating depression is because i've been reading a book lately called anatomy of an epidemic i've gotten to learn about the history of psychiatric medications being prescribed in the united states reading this book has made me realize just how desperately people cling to ideas about drugs that they really want them to work for them they really want there to be some solution some cure that they can take in a pill form when their problems cannot be solved just by taking a pill millions of people are willing to take psychiatric medications with horrible side effects many people are willing to take medications that inflict brain damage on them for years in order to help with their depression so to me it's not surprising that people are now turning to ketamine to try to treat their depression by reading some of the personal accounts in this book of people who have tried many different psychiatric medications and have struggled to come off the psychiatric medications once they've started them i've come to realize that i was actually one of the lucky ones i was prescribed lexipro i was prescribed an antidepressant medication and i was able to stop taking it i haven't been through this drug mill that so many people millions of people have been through where they try one medication and it doesn't work for them they still feel depressed and they have terrible side effects so the doctor prescribes them either an additional medication or a different medication to try to find something that'll work for you you just have to work to find the right one you have to try different medications and then one will work for you one will click but what happens when none of the psychiatric medications that a psychiatrist can prescribe to you work what happens when your depression is still there when you feel down still ketamine take ketamine this is at epidemic levels this is a terrible problem and people are still resorting to anything that they can get their hands on to give themselves brain damage it's just insanity just looking at some of the names on the cover of this book klonopin lamigtal zyprexa wellbutrin prozac xanax okay so if these forms of brain damage haven't worked for you maybe you should try this other one it's called ketamine yeah so you might have heard of ketamine some people joke around that it's a horse pill that it's a horse tranquilizer but no no this drug it's been around a long time but recently things have changed they've had some new discoveries that this can cure your depression look to me i've heard this all before i heard this with cannabis when i was growing up cannabis i knew was a party drug i knew it was something that people took recreationally then it turned into this medicinal drug that people said would cure their depression would cure what ailed them these are the compromises that people live with in order to convince themselves that they're treating their depression they'll put up with brain damage they'll put up with horrible side effects just to feel better for a brief period of time to feel something different they might feel some euphoria in the short term like dr bregen says that brain injury can induce euphoria briefly but then over time it will just lead to apathy so if those claims that i heard about cannabis helping with depression and anxiety were true then why are people now resorting to ketamine cannabis was already the answer over the last 20 years we've heard so much about the positive benefits of medicinal marijuana right so why do we need to have medicinal ketamine right probably because neither of those drugs actually cure depression so what's next if it's not cannabis if it's not ketamine what else is there remember about 30 years ago we had the first safe injection site here and guess what it was illegal just like it's illegal to give out safe drugs now so you guys are following in the footsteps of a great tradition where you start doing something illegal and then it becomes legal [Applause] if if dolph and vandu with hardly any resources can give away free and safe drugs why can't governments that have millions in their budgets all of the public health folks everyone who knows anything about drugs all of the people who use drugs they say we need a safe supply not just a safe supply for a few hundred people but a safe supply for everyone who wants us we are giving away more drugs in these boxes are more drugs than these limits we are still breaking the law because you know what the law isn't helping us we help us [Applause]