Ketamine Abuse Among Rave Seekers

Ketamine has been increasingly abuse since 5 years ago especially among youth in the club scenes. It started off in big cities like Kuala Lumpur and Penang, and became more common in other cities in the country for that past 3 years. It had been marketed by the drug pusher as a club drug that does not produced urine drug test positive. It gained wide acceptance when more police raids were conducted in clubs and rave parties. At that particular time, many were caught positive for drugs such as ecstasy and eramine 5. Ketamine instantly became an alternative of getting high without the fear of been caught with positive urine drug test. This increased demand was easily met with increased trafficking of ketamine from south Asia. For the past 3 years, newspapers had highlighted seizures of ketamine from couriers at the local airports. Most of these seizures were coincidental, and it was widely belief that less than 5% of the ketamine were seized.

Ketamine became popular among Chinese youth, with more girls took this drug than ever before when compare it other drug of abuse. The other factor that contributes this upsurge of ketamine abuse is that whenever a new drug appears in the market, people are unaware of its complications because complications usually developed 2 to 3 years after its use. It is also been marketed as a cool drug because it needs only to be snorted through the nostrils (nose) and does not require any apparatus. The drug pushers were able to falsely convince the youth that the drug was not addictive and not harmful.

Unfortunately as any illicit drugs that alter the mind, ketamine exerts its complication among a subpopulation of the users. Heavy user of ketamine developed typical symptoms of drug dependence. These symptoms are
• Unable to stop or reduce the use of ketamine
• Needs to use ketamine to work, study or any function of daily activities.
• Resort to lying or stealing to get money to buy ketamine.
• Start to have reduced functioning in work, study or social activities.
• Needs higher dose of ketamine in order to get similar high of the drug.

These symptoms are typical of drug dependence and the users have lost the ability to control their drug use. Even though they know the ketamine have wreck havoc to their life, they continue to use it and give all sorts of reason on the need to continue its use.

Usually after a year of developing the drug dependence, physical complications start to set in. The 2 most common complications are acute gastritis and cystitis (inflammation of urinary bladder).

1. Acute gastritis

This condition occurs because ketamine cause the stomach to shrink and increase secretion of gastric juice. The pain occurs at the central top part of the abdomen (epigastria). Reduction of ketamine use will result in severe epigastric pain, and they continue taking more dosage of ketamine which subsequently resulted in the stomach to shrink and increase gastric juice further. Usually standard medical treatment for gastric ulcer does not work because the user continues taking the ketamine.

2. Acute Cystitis

This is a major complication of prolonged ketamine use. Ketamine causes the lower part of the brain to send strong signals to the urinary bladder to constrict. This prolonged constriction resulted in the urinary bladder to shrink and the person will not able to hold his urine. He will need to urinate every few minutes and many of them unable to go out from the house without a need to use the pampers. They also suffer from urgency, pain in passing urine, blood in the urine and lower abdominal pain. Some of them have severe shrink of the urinary bladder that resulted in the ureter(the tube from the kidney to the urinary bladder) to kinked and resulted in urine backflow which will then caused kidney damage.

Ketamine abuse can be treated with medications that reduce the ketamine effects and specific drug counselling to reduce the craving for the drug. Those that suffer from the complications of the urinary bladder may require admission to a specialised medical drug treatment centre that can treat both the urinary bladder and the ketamine addiction.