Ketamine has helped countless LGBTQ people find comfort and clarity — but as use increases, so do worries about addiction and physical side-effects. Does the queer scene have a ket problem?
to allow individuals to choose what is healthy for them and in what contexts. “People [who tell] a clinician that they want to stop drugs face an abstinence-only paradigm, when that may not be their goal,” says Belser. “Through the creation of new synapses, [ketamine] may open a critical learning window for people to give up old, ingrained behavior and take up new habits,” particularly when used within an evidence-based treatment program.
CURIOUS BY NATURE, Walter Wall was drawn to ketamine’s ever-changing effects. While some drugs were simply uppers or downers, ketamine felt “like stepping to the side.” At age 30, after nine years of intermittent use, he returned from Burning Man in 2018 feeling like ketamine “was good for me” and began snorting several bumps a day, partly to cope with the anxieties of living in the closet.
Within a year, Wall was spending upwards of $3,000 a month to consume about two grams daily. The first gram he’d bump throughout the day, before doing the rest in large, hallucinogenic doses to venture through alternate realities. His life came to feel “like a Marvel movie,” he says. By night, he was a superhero battling imagined dark forces; in the morning, he’d resume a “boring” life with a touch of afterglow.
In addition to physical consequences, prolonged self-medication with ketamine can severely warp one’s perceptions. Megan, a queer person who felt she could speak more candidly by not using her real name, recalls taking ketamine so often in college that she once snorted a line off the back of her laptop during a lecture. “That was when I noticed my patterns moving in the direction of a coping mechanism,” she says.
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