The Geopolitics of Ketamine (Part 1)
Ketamine at the turn of the millennium
Clockwise from top left: pharmaceutical drug manufacturing equipment; Howard Alltounian and Marcia Moore; nightclub in Goa, India; nightclub in Hong Kong, China; several doses of a drug. See photo credits below.
The following is an excerpt from p. 201-206 of Chapter 4, “Mystical Medicine, Wicked Weapon: A Both/And Approach to Ketamine” from my new book, Drugism (2022):
Like many drugs, ketamine was first embraced by the upper class (Marcia Moore, John Lilly, etc.) but soon enough became a favorite of the masses. While historically this process might have taken hundreds of years, thanks to modern technology and drug culture the shift took roughly twenty years in ketamine’s case. Although it was available on the street in the 1970s, it would become noticeably more popular in such contexts in the ‘90s.
[Note: earlier in the book, I discuss in detail the case of Marcia Moore, the Sheraton hotel heiress who developed a love of ketamine in the 1970s and who, new evidence suggests, was murdered by her husband with the drug in 1979.]
According to ketamine scholar Karl Jansen, the publication of Journeys into the Bright World by Marcia Moore and Howard Alltounian in 1978 and certain material by John Lilly (specifically, the 1978 edition of The Scientist which described in detail his work with ketamine) scared the FDA and created an atmosphere of governmental suspicion around the drug.[i] The first effort to add ketamine to the Controlled Substances Act was made the same year that Marcia Moore’s remains were found, in 1981.[ii] But the effort did not succeed. It was more than a decade before the push to restrict ketamine gained any serious traction.
Ketamine was first embraced by the upper class but soon enough became a favorite of the masses.
Something else happened in 1978 that shaped ketamine's destiny but which on the surface may seem unrelated. The year prior, Deng Xiaoping had emerged as the political leader of China.[iii] In 1978, he initiated what would become an extended series of economic reforms that radically reshaped China's interaction with the rest of the world in the following decades. The result was a shift within China away from pure communist policy to a sort of hybrid of communism and capitalism.[iv]
Ketamine found itself at the center of this shift. The following year—1979, the same year Marcia Moore went missing—China’s military began to use ketamine as an anesthetic.[v] It was the start of China’s complicated relationship with the drug, and yet another example in which a population’s exposure to a substance began with its military. The ketamine used by the Chinese military was produced by Taiyuan Pharmaceuticals, which at the time was state-owned. Later, when ketamine became a popular drug among China’s urban nightlife, this same lab would play a role.
However, ketamine's popularity within China can only be properly understood in the context of its global rise in popularity. Ketamine would not become seriously popular in China until the US tightened its regulations on the drug in the late ‘90s. By then, of course, ketamine had already become fairly popular in the US and Europe.
The key which had unlocked ketamine's growth came not from China but from another large, Asian nation: India. There, the combination of a large pharmaceutical industry and the party scene that had developed in Goa served as a powerful catalyst for ketamine's popularity across the globe. Goa, which sits on India's west coast, is known for its beaches and has been a destination for tourists for decades.[vi] It is also known for its music scene and an abundance of drugs.
A campaign to federally control ketamine in the US was launched in 1996, by none other than Joe Biden.
Western tourists could easily buy ketamine over the counter in India at the time. From Goa, some of these Western tourists—particularly DJs—brought ketamine with them when they returned home. This is considered by many to have been an important factor in popularizing ketamine in the European and US club scenes. Its use in such contexts then, in turn, helped further popularize ketamine more generally.
While much of the ketamine use in this period occurred in clubs and at festivals, some also used it in more personal, solitary contexts, often at higher doses, hoping not for a buzz but a k-hole. This latter trend is evidenced by the drug's inclusion in D. M. Turner's The Essential Psychedelic Guide, a book we learned about in the previous chapter which was first published in 1994. Turner had an intense and ultimately tragic relationship with ketamine, which we will revisit shortly.
Interestingly, ketamine’s biggest advocate grew quite bitter as his favorite drug became more and more trendy. John Lilly, when asked by Karl Jansen what he thought about the growing popularity of ketamine in dance clubs, replied, “it’s stupid.” Those who use the drug in such scenarios, he insisted, “are unthinking people.”[vii]
With the increase in use, press coverage of ketamine grew in the ‘90s as journalists rushed to describe the newly-popular trend. Political enmity toward the drug also geared up in the same decade, more or less in sync with its rise in popularity. Throughout the ‘90s, numerous states[1] passed legislation to restrict ketamine. In 1995, the DEA announced that ketamine had joined its “emerging drugs list.”[viii]
The following year, a campaign to federally control ketamine was launched by none other than Joe Biden, who was a Senator for Delaware at the time.[ix] Biden originally wanted the drug to be added to Schedule II of the CSA. After a few years of political back-and-forth, the drug was ultimately added not to Schedule II but to Schedule III of the CSA in 1999, where it remains to this day.
In the early 2000s, one person could make millions of dollars a year just from trafficking diverted ketamine.
As Jansen pointed out, ketamine “became even more profitable to deal in when it became a controlled substance in the United States.”[x] A keen observer of drug history could have easily predicted this. Historian Alfred McCoy and others have noted that restrictive drug laws reliably result in the expansion, rather than suppression, of the drug in question.
Why? When any given drug is prohibited, the reduction in legal supply of the drug tends not to reduce demand. Instead, it increases the price than consumers are willing to pay for the drug. This, in turn, incentivizes new actors to get involved in its production. Illicit distributors then develop trafficking routes which further expose new populations (and, more often than not, entire nations) to the drug. In the end, the given drug is both more popular and more expensive than it was before its restriction.[xi]
In the case of ketamine, this is precisely what happened. After it was added to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act in 1999, ketamine gradually became a standard part of the repertoires of drug trafficking organizations around the world. In the years immediately afterward, ketamine production was centralized in Mexico and India. It rapidly took root in China as well, only to be violently suppressed and ultimately driven south to countries like Myanmar and Pakistan which are today the centers of illicit ketamine production.
We already saw how India played a role in ketamine's proliferation. Tourists in Goa purchased it over the counter, sometimes in bulk, and brought it back with them to their respective social circles in Europe and the US. In Mexico, a similar dynamic played out.
We learned through the story of Marcia Moore in Section V that Mexico was already a source of diverted ketamine by the mid-1970s. It was just one of many drugs produced legally in Mexico that could be easily obtained by visitors from the US. By the time Rama shared his Mexican-sourced ketamine with Marcia Moore, others had been doing the same with amphetamines and barbiturates for twenty years. As explained earlier, this trend was largely a consequence of the 1956 Narcotics Control Act and developed rapidly after its passage. And it continued long after the '70s.
At the turn of the millennium, the practice was still going strong and, if anything, had been augmented by the internet. In this period, ketamine was produced in Mexico by companies such as Ttokkyo and Cheminova.[xii] Ttokkyo specialized in steroids but also sold large volumes of ketamine in the late '90s and early 2000s. Much of it wound up diverted and distributed alongside other drugs of questionable legal status.
Ketamine soon became a standard part of drug trafficking organizations’ repertoires around the world.
Thanks to the wonders of the web, we have access to an interview with an anonymous former distributor of Ttokkyo ketamine. It gives us a frank and to-the-point explanation of the role that Mexico played in the US ketamine market in this period which, for our purposes, is rather illuminating.
In the interview, the former distributor insists "they never wanted to sell K.”[xiii] However, they were offered an opportunity to make $20,000 from one ketamine transaction. That was all it took to convince them to get into ketamine distribution. The ketamine was sourced from a Ttokkyo lab in Mexico.
They recalled that the wholesale price of the ketamine was eight dollars per bottle. Since a bottle typically contained multiple doses (depending on the tolerance of the consumer), the price it went for on the street was several times that. Among some distributors, transactions which consisted of tens of thousands of bottles at a time were not uncommon. The result, according to the former distributor, was that one person could make millions of dollars a year just from trafficking diverted ketamine.
With numbers like that, it is no wonder that ketamine quickly got the attention of more established drug trafficking organizations. Soon enough, they figured out how to produce it themselves, bypassing the need for legal pharmaceutical labs. Another country which, in this same period, became not only a large supplier of the drug but also a source of significant demand is one we briefly mentioned at the start of this section: China.
Dylan Levi King is a translator and journalist who lived in China for several years in the early 2000s. He wrote a brilliant analysis of the politics of ketamine in China entitled "Ketamine and the Return of the Party-State," published in Palladium in July, 2021. In it, King explains that some of the first people in China to use ketamine in recreational, social settings were none other than the Goa party crowd, who brought the drug with them in their travels to Hong Kong.
They were not the first westerners to procure cheap drugs in India and distribute them in Hong Kong.[2] And it is almost certain they were not the last. Perfectly demonstrating McCoy's above-mentioned point on prohibition, ketamine began to get big in Hong Kong immediately after its addition to the CSA in the US.
But China's ketamine boom was not solely the result of US drug policy. There were factors at play within China itself that which proved conducive to the drug's proliferation. King examines these in the Palladium piece and concludes that Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms directly contributed, albeit inadvertently, to the spread of ketamine in China's cities at the turn of the millennium.
Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms directly contributed, albeit inadvertently, to the spread of ketamine in China.
As explained above, Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late '70s and very soon thereafter began to shift China away from the strict communism of Mao Zedong. In the early '90s, Deng introduced more policies which further intensified this shift and which positioned China favorably to the west.[xiv] Many state-owned enterprises became privatized, and China ramped up its business with the US.
This brought wealth and disposable income to China. However, it also stripped away various social support systems that had previously been provided or overseen by the government. Mass layoffs of public sector jobs created waves of migrant labor as people moved to the country's coastal cities in search of employment. The simultaneous alienation of large numbers of workers and the dialing back of government control created a ripe environment for the proliferation of drug use.[xv]
By the time ketamine hit Hong Kong, this process had already been underway for a few years. After it was introduced to the city by travelers from Goa, the drug was briefly trendy among Hong Kong celebrities. Very quickly, it caught on in the city's nightlife. It did not take long for ketamine to spread to other cities. In the early 2000s, it seemed to be ubiquitous among China's urban nightlife, according to King.
It also seemed that China's government was willing to look the other way, at least initially. Taiyuan Pharmaceuticals, the same lab which had produced ketamine for the Chinese military, made a deal with a gangster from Hong Kong to produce ketamine for illicit distribution. Further up the coast, in the small village of Boshe, a cartel began to produce sizeable quantities of ketamine and methamphetamine. The cartel's leader, Cai Dongjia, was a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and held a position in his region's Municipal People's Congress.[xvi]
In 2006, China launched a global political campaign to rid the world of ketamine.
However, the CCP's newfound leniency toward drugs did not last long. Soon enough they realized that they were getting played, once again, by drug distributors looking to profit off of their people. In 2006, China's government launched a political campaign, global in scope, in an extended effort to rid the world of ketamine. However, despite a series of attempts by China's government to eradicate ketamine, and despite its newly-illegal status in the US, the drug only continued to grow in popularity in the early years of the twenty-first century.[xvii]
[Click here to read Part 2.]
Footnotes
[1] States which restricted ketamine before federal legislation was enacted include California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. See Kelly, The Little Book of Ketamine, 91-92.
[2] The British East India Company did the same with opium and tea for decades in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Endnotes
[i] Jansen, 25.
[ii] Kelly, The Little Book…, 92.
[iii] Background information on Deng Xiaoping taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on him: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Deng-Xiaoping.
[iv] Fukuyama, Political Order and…, 357, 371; Rockefeller, Memoirs, 262-263.
[v] King, “Ketamine and the…”
[vi] St John, Mystery School in…, 202; for more information on Goa, India, see: https://www.britannica.com/place/Goa.
[vii] Jansen, 64.
[viii] See ibid., 33 and Kelly, The Little Book…, 8 and 91.
[ix] Kelly, The Little Book…, 92.
[x] Jansen, 195.
[xi] McCoy, The Politics of…, 20-22; 457-458.
[xii] Kelly, 12 and Roberts, “The Rise and…”
[xiii] Roberts, “The Rise and…”
[xiv] King; Fukuyama, 376.
[xv] King. This also occurred with heroin; see Glenny, McMafia, 326.
[xvi] King.
[xvii] “Results From The...”
Sources
Fukuyama, Francis. Political Order and Political Decay. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, NY. 2014.
Glenny, Misha. McMafia: A Journey Through The Global Criminal Underworld. Vintage Books, New York: NY. 2009
Jansen, Karl. Ketamine: Dreams and Realities. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, Sarasota, FL. 2004.
Kelly, Kit. The Little Book of Ketamine. Ronin Publishing, Inc., Berkeley, CA. 1999.
King, Dylan Levi. “Ketamine and the Return of the Party-State.” Palladium, Jun 23, 2021. https://www.palladiummag.com//2021/06/23/ketamine-and-the-return-of-the-party-state/
McCoy, Alfred. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, IL. 2003.
“Results From The 2014 National Survey On Drug Use And Health: Detailed Tables.” Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Sep 10, 2015. https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUH-DetTabs2014/NSDUH-DetTabs2014.pdf
Roberts, Anthony. “The Rise and Fall of Ttokkyo Laboratories.” MESO-Rx, Mar 1, 2006.
Rockefeller, David. Memoirs. Random House, New York, NY. 2002.
St John, Graham. Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT. Evolver Editions, Berkeley, CA. 2015.
Photo credits
Pharmaceutical drug manufacturing equipment from Pharmalab: https://www.pharmalab.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/03_Packaging-1-1380x600.jpg
Howard Alltounian and Marcia Moore: https://nemaloknig.net/picimg/373/3736/37366/373665/_1.png
Goa nightclub from tripoto: https://www.tripoto.com/goa/trips/the-most-famous-bar-pubs-in-goa-for-adults-nightclub-in-goa-5d16e24011bb3
Hong Kong nightclub from Travelvui: https://www.travelvui.com/hong-kong/10-nightclubs-in-hong-kong-with-best-dance-floors-and-djs/
Lines of powdered drug from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/feb/24/british-drug-use-falling
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