A new CNN documentary explores the evolution of ketamine.
Ketamine has been around since the early 1960s. But the untimely death of “Friends” star Matthew Perry in October 2023 has thrust the drug into the public spotlight.
A new CNN documentary explores the evolution of ketamine, from its use as a battlefield anesthetic during the Vietnam War to its rise to popularity as a party drug in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1999, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration classified ketamine as a Schedule III non-narcotic substance under the Controlled Substances Act. Today, even though ketamine is only FDA-approved as an anesthetic, hundreds of startup clinics and telemedicine companies are marketing the drug as an off-label treatment for various mental and physical conditions.
“The industry is not really regulated, and it kind of allows this Wild West to fester,” journalist Manisha Krishnan asserts in the documentary. “You will inevitably get bad actors who then stigmatize an entire industry and an entire drug.”
Further complicating the landscape today, celebrities from Elon Musk to Sharon Osbourne have publicly touted ketamine as a breakthrough mental-health treatment.
“On the one hand I’m grateful that they’re being advocates,” Dr. David Feifel, founder and CEO of the Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute, says in the documentary. “On the other hand, I do worry that it becomes too trendy and it becomes too trivialized. It’s like yoga or a vitamin; you should do your ketamine.”
In his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” Perry describes ketamine treatment as “a giant exhale.” However, CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta notes that the ketamine levels found in Perry’s bloodstream after his death “could not have been attributed to a clinical administering a week and a half earlier.”
“This was ketamine that had been taken far more recently,” Gupta observes.
On Oct. 28, 2023, Perry was found unresponsive in the jacuzzi at his home in Los Angeles. The County of Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner determined that the primary cause of Perry’s death was “the acute effects of ketamine.”
Still, experts featured in the CNN documentary point out that fatal overdoses attributed exclusively to ketamine are rare.
“Most of the fatalities from ketamine are a result of combination with other drugs that are more fatal, and/or unmonitored engagement with the environments,” Feifel asserts. “If somebody is doing ketamine unmonitored and they’re next to a body of water, that’s a recipe for disaster.”
Gupta adds: “If it weren’t for the ketamine, [Perry would] probably still be alive today. But at the same time, it probably wasn’t the ketamine that killed him.”
Earlier this month, HOPE Therapeutics, a subsidiary of NRx Pharmaceuticals, said it plans to acquire the Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute and appoint Feifel as HOPE’s chief medical officer. In a news release, NRx and HOPE said the companies “wholeheartedly” support Feifel’s view that ketamine should be administered in a controlled setting under appropriate psychiatric supervision.
“When it’s given legitimately, we see the miraculous, life-saving ketamine,” Feifel asserts in the CNN documentary. “When it’s done for monetary purposes, we see the dark side of ketamine.”