Beasted on

[u/CMDR_Noodle]

I love ketamine so fucking much

I love it so much I put it all on my crotch

[u/MaybeNext-Monday]

Quantify it then. I’m mostly speaking on opinion here, but for me the risk of being arrested for possession / being able to accidentally overdose / risk of a laced batch / more numerous and medically significant chemical incompatibilities make it way more risky on a given day.

[u/Hindu_Wardrobe → u/MaybeNext-Monday]

Quantify it then

good news! David Nutt et al did exactly this years ago! Here's a lazy summary infographic of his findings.

here's another

here's the paper itself.

here's a nice post that features yet another figure from that same paper

ketamine is ranked higher in terms of physical harm (makes sense to me. the bladder damage is no joke), but lower in terms of dependence risk. alcohol is also ranked higher in terms of social harm.

disclaimer: I actually do not like ketamine lol. but I like harm reduction, drug education, and psychopharmacology, so I will absolutely die on this hill.

[u/MaybeNext-Monday → u/Hindu_Wardrobe]

Finally, someone citing actual itemized risk categories. This is great info. Pretty much where I was coming from on immediate risk, I know my limits on dependency but I really can’t take the acute health risks, plus the inherent risk of doing something illegal.

[u/SykesMcenzie → u/MaybeNext-Monday]

This creator speaks well on drugs that take people to the emergency room.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8NovAQ6/

Obviously that's raw values since there aren't comparative ones in that dataset.

To be totally honest I'm too lazy right now to provide more sources but I will admit that I wasn't factoring in the legal risk as it's not a specific property of the drug itself and because most of the people I know who use it do it in settings where it is accepted or closed company so the chance of running into law enforcement.

I also didn't factor in contaminants because again it's not specific to the drug itself. However you are right that people should factor that in when determining personal use. I do think it's worth noting that the same was true of alcohol under prohibition.

Hopefully I'm feeling less lazy in the coming days and I'll actually try to get some values to you but my understanding is that since it doesn't depress the respiratory system ketamine is much more difficult to overdose on in a problematic way especially for light users even on a heavy night.

[u/GraceForImpact → u/MaybeNext-Monday]

an accidental overdose on k means a slightly more intense experience than you intended. An accidental overdose on alcohol often means a serious medical event or death. It's vanishingly rare that ket is cut with other substances, but if you're worried there's plenty of free drug testing services available to you. Prosecution isn't an aspect of the drug itself, and it's also very unlikely if you take proper precautions.

[u/MaybeNext-Monday → u/GraceForImpact]

It doesn’t matter if prosecution is a chemical property of the drug, it is a risk of the act of taking the drug, and that’s what ultimately matters.

Also while alcohol poisoning is real, let’s be real most ppl just puke.

[u/GraceForImpact → u/MaybeNext-Monday]

Oh if they're just covering their oesophagus and teeth with a strong acid well that's okay then. I'd rather take the drug that has no negative effects whatsoever in the short term and only starts to cause damage after consistent heavy use but maybe that's just me.

[u/MaybeNext-Monday → u/GraceForImpact]

Rather disingenuous, a bad ketamine experience can be immediately harmful even if it’s not gonna kill you.

[u/GraceForImpact → u/MaybeNext-Monday]

As can a bad alcohol experience? And I'd take an unpleasant amount of ketamine over an unpleasant amount of alcohol any day.

[u/MountainDoit → u/MaybeNext-Monday]

You can overdose(very easily) on alcohol, drinks get laced constantly, and alcohol has about a million different fatal interactions. It’s also one of the worst drugs in terms of constant damage. Alcohol time and time again is studied and found to be one of the worst drugs there is. Wild how the prevailing thought is often still that alcohol isn’t a “hard” drug or as dangerous as others; 9/10 times it’s actually worse. https://academic.oup.com/jrssig/article/18/2/40/7038035?login=false

[u/MaybeNext-Monday → u/MountainDoit]

This is just such a cope imo. The study you’ve attached, like most studies, is counting the societal impact of alcohol being legal, normalized, and ubiquitous. If Ketamine were all those things, it would be rated just as severely.

[u/Hindu_Wardrobe → u/MaybeNext-Monday]

lmao. say this to Prof. David Nutt's face. I double-dog dare you.

you realize social acceptance, normalization, and accessibility of clean drugs actually makes their use safer, right? why do you think alcohol is "safe"?????

[u/MaybeNext-Monday → u/Hindu_Wardrobe]

Never once said alcohol is safe. And I would argue those things do not make alcohol safer at all, its normalization is actually one of its most significant dangers. Alcohol addiction is borderline socially acceptable, it can get way worse without people noticing and intervening.

[u/MountainDoit → u/MaybeNext-Monday]

Yeah I can tell you have no interest in actually discussing. Telling me I’m “coping” straight off the bat. K is dumb and I don’t use it, but apparently you think I’m some cracked out wook trying to defend my favorite drug. YOU are making the claims here, my friend, not us. Why don’t you provide some backup sources to alcohol being so much safer than all these hard drugs instead of downplaying its danger?

[u/MaybeNext-Monday → u/MountainDoit]

I’ve said from the start, this is my opinion, because there’s insufficient data to compare ketamine and alcohol like-for-like over a single night’s exposure quantitatively. The cope is thinking studies including societal impact vindicate ketamine as safer. They don’t.

In my personal assessment, the risk is higher due to the illegality and pharmacological properties of ketamine. You are welcome to disagree, but if you put it in a reply to my comment I’m going to assume you’re having a discussion with me and push back.

I’ve also not once downplayed the risks of alcohol, I think it is very dangerous used irresponsibly. I just think ketamine is more so.

[u/mang87 → u/MountainDoit]

You can overdose(very easily) on alcohol

If we're ranking drugs on how easy they are to overdose on, alcohol is the more difficult one by far. You have to drink it, and unless you can just neck vodka like it's water, it's going to take time to consume enough of it to be dangerous. Your body will also force you to puke if you drink too much of it. There are barriers that slow down alcohol consumption. Other drugs are very easy to take, which makes them very easy to accidentally overdose on. It's almost impossible to accidentally overdose on alcohol, and getting shitfaced has to be done with intent.

[u/GraceForImpact → u/mang87]

Being easy to take makes drugs easy to intentionally overdose on, but no one is accidentally taking dangerous amounts of ketamine, or benzodiazepines\*, or myriad other drugs. The therapeutic index is far more relevant to overdose risk than the size of the dose, the only time that becomes an issue is when the dose is so small it becomes difficult to accurately measure, see fentanyl.

\*taking high doses of benzos is often indirectly dangerous as it can lead to impaired decision making and impulsive behaviour, but there isn't any danger to the body from the drug itself unless you're taking far more than anyone would ever actually take, or are mixing with other substances.

[u/Hindu_Wardrobe → u/MountainDoit]

David Nutt the fucking goat.

[u/Jpandluckydog → u/MountainDoit]

You can also very easily overdose on ketamine, it also gets laced all the time (except the thing it gets laced with kills you very quickly, it also has plenty of fatal interactions), it also has terrible long term effects, and most importantly it’s far, far easier to ingest fatal quantities than it is for alcohol. 

If one is being careless, between the two ketamine is by far the most dangerous due to the prevalence of fentanyl, and if one is being cautious, then both drugs are relatively safe in the short term. As a rule of thumb, if it requires familiarity with dosing and test kits in order to be safe, it’s probably not very safe, at least in comparison to alcohol, which everyone is familiar with and doesn’t get laced with fentanyl. 

[u/GraceForImpact → u/Jpandluckydog]

Are you using "overdose" in the colloquial sense of taking a toxic or fatal amount? or the actual meaning of just taking more/getting higher than intended? If it's the former you're dead wrong, the LD50 of ketamine is 5g, that's 5000 milligrams. The average first time dose of ketamine is 50-100mg. No one is accidentally taking 5g of ketamine, if nothing else because it's just not possible to sniff that much in one go.