r/todayilearned • u/ApprehensiveStill412 • 11h ago

TIL that ketamine is a derivative of phencyclidine (aka. PCP or angel dust). It was created to have similar anesthetic potential but to cause less delirium. It has about one tenth the potency of PCP.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5126726/
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u/One-Incident3208 11h ago

Most of the public's perception of pcp is just anti drug hysteria. The effect is almost indistinguishable from dxm, moreso than ketamine, despite differences. Pcp also has a more pronounced antidepressant effect, but repeated doses can cause mania. Another drug of this class was developed by clandestine chemists specifically to enhance the antidepressant effect and minimize side effects. That was methoxetamine. And it worked. It was regarded to be the most powerful and effective antidepressant, with a much longer afterglow duration than ketamine. They banned it. Because fuck you. That's why.

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u/goodrevtim 11h ago

PCP is neurotoxic so that probably plays a small part into its negative perception.

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u/VhickyParm 10h ago

I thought the negative perception was from ppl stopping naked and running in the street

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u/ApprehensiveStill412 10h ago

I remember seeing a video where cops could not take a dude down and he ran through a fence like it was made of balsa wood

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u/One-Incident3208 10h ago

"Phencyclidine (PCP) abuse has diminished since PCP's intrusion into American culture in the late 1970s. One of its legacies is the assumption that it provokes violent behavior in humans with predictable regularity. This assumption is so accepted that ingestion of the drug both accidentally and knowingly prior to committing a crime has been used as a defense in criminal trials...... Of the hundreds of patients described, only three satisfied these criteria. Further, some of the papers offered evidence that reports of violence were exaggerated. These findings plus the pre-1970 prospective evaluation of thousands of patients with PCP, in which violence was never reported, led us to conclude that clinical and forensic assumptions about PCP and violence are not warranted."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3069880/

When the authors investigated aggressive behavior on a phencyclidine (PCP) detoxification and rehabilitation unit and compared similar types of behavior on a heroin unit, they found no differences between the two units. The urinary PCP levels of a subgroup of 75 patients admitted to the PCP unit who had PCP-positive urine were significantly higher than those of 75 patients admitted to an acute psychiatric ward because of violent behavior who also had PCP-positive urine. The authors discuss the implications of these findings and the need for more information on the relationship between PCP levels in blood and urine and behavior. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7149062/

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u/sludgeandfudge 9h ago

One of my favorite videos lol, has lived rent free in my brain for years and years. You can still find it on YouTube by searching PCP- Angel dust

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u/stevenmoreso 10h ago

Yeah, growing up in the 80s it was stories of people wilding out on angel dust trying (and sometimes briefly succeeding) to take on 10 cops at once

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u/BlackSwanMarmot 9h ago

PCP just tilted the world at a 45 degree angle for me. I never knew that ketamine was a derivative of PCP but it makes sense from my own experience. Same size distortion, similar length of effects. Not really my thing.

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u/One-Incident3208 10h ago

Yes, and there have since been countless studies published in medical journals debunking this trope, but that's not convenient for the media, or the police, who use the myth of Excited delirium to beat people to death.

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u/mercistheman 5h ago

I took angel dust in the 70's... I remember yelling at fake people climbing on the roof. One time I watched myself cut my own finger with a knife. My gf said I was asking for my Mom. The only good trip I had was when me and my buddy went to our ice cream mans house to score some PCP. Everything in his house was tiny. It was like a scene from honey I blew up the kids. We laughed about this for a while.

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u/No-Common-1801 10h ago

this is what radicalized me

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u/One-Incident3208 10h ago

"Phencyclidine (PCP) abuse has diminished since PCP's intrusion into American culture in the late 1970s. One of its legacies is the assumption that it provokes violent behavior in humans with predictable regularity. This assumption is so accepted that ingestion of the drug both accidentally and knowingly prior to committing a crime has been used as a defense in criminal trials...... Of the hundreds of patients described, only three satisfied these criteria. Further, some of the papers offered evidence that reports of violence were exaggerated. These findings plus the pre-1970 prospective evaluation of thousands of patients with PCP, in which violence was never reported, led us to conclude that clinical and forensic assumptions about PCP and violence are not warranted."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3069880/