"The War On Drugs"

[adios 717]

https://www.wired.com/story/ketamine-stirs-up-hope-controversy-as-a-depression-drug

[adios 717]

 

I know it's a long article but it's well worth a read, even if Wired isn't exactly a medical journal.   

 

Some highlights:

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KETAMINE IS AN old medication; it was first synthesized in 1962 as a safer alternative to then-available anesthetics, which sometimes suppressed patients' breathing to the point of killing them. It's considered so safe by anesthesiologists that it's routinely used on children. But it has also become a popular club drug and can be addictive. Recreational users call it "special K," and the euphoric, hallucinatory experience it induces the "K-hole."

Research on ketamine as an antidepressant is in its infancy, but scientists speculate that it increases brain plasticity, the ability of the brain to change. To Michael, it made intuitive sense that augmenting your brain's malleability might help you break out of what felt like an otherwise inescapable mental rut.

 

 

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As the journalist Andrew Solomon points out in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, these two concepts of depression—one centered on biology, the other on how we're shaped by experience—have dueled ever since. "Hippocrates is, in effect, the grandfather of Prozac," Solomon writes. "Plato is the grandfather of psychodynamic therapy."

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This is why there's so much excitement around ketamine. It offers relief to many patients who previously didn't respond to anything. When it works, the drug acts within hours, not weeks, which makes it especially promising for patients at risk of suicide. And because it targets a different neurotransmitter system—not serotonin but glutamate—it's giving scientists new insight into the biology of depression.

About half of patients respond to intravenous infusions of ketamine, and roughly half of those achieve full remission. The studies done so far are generally small, and the duration of the antidepressant effect is about one week. Yet because the therapy is experimental and only given to people who've failed other treatments, the patients treated are, by definition, the most difficult to treat.

 

 

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There's plenty to fret over. Weekly booster shots are often required to maintain remission, and the effects of repeated dosing remain unclear. Among chronic, recreational users, ketamine has been linked with brain lesions, persistent hallucinations, and a strange inflammation of the bladder that, at its worst, requires removal of the organ. Addicts are extreme cases, of course. No one knows how much they've taken, for how long, and what else they've been imbibing. But given ketamine's addictive potential, most experts I spoke with urged caution. The last thing anyone wants is to accidentally spark another crisis like the opioid epidemic, they say, which began in part with the noble intent to treat people's pain.

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Forty years later, scientists at the University of Mississippi found that people who'd committed suicide—arguably the end result of a battle with severe depression—had abnormalities in their NMDA receptors compared to controls of the same age. At the same time, researchers were zeroing in on this receptor subtype in rodent models of depression. In 1990, Phil Skolnick, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, discovered that when he treated animals with drugs that dampened NMDA receptor activity, they fared better in stressful tests, indicating an antidepressant-like effect.

SSRIs had just come on the market and while many hailed them as a godsend, it remained puzzling why they took so long to work. Skolnick's research again implicated the glutamate system. In animals treated with SSRIs, serotonin went up immediately, but it was only when the activity of their NMDA receptors became suppressed that the antidepressant effect emerged.

 

 

[TheGingerQuiff 2412]

You're preaching to the choir

[adios 717]

Well I'm defo getting some with my next order but always interested in the opinions on here.

[SpaceCadet 5]

Decriminalise the consumption of all drugs.

[Alex 35566]

11 minutes ago, adios said:

Well I'm defo getting some with my next order but always interested in the opinions on here.

Definitely sounds like a potential game changer. Even more so than boiling taps

[adios 717]

6 minutes ago, SpaceCadet said:

Decriminalise the consumption of all drugs.

Legalise and tax.

[Dr Gloom 22134]

K hole? I’ve been trapped in a K dungeon, submerged by K sand, lost in a K cave.

[SpaceCadet 5]

22 minutes ago, adios said:

Legalise and tax.

 

Just medical marijuana. 

[adios 717]

No, everything (or close to).

[Alex 35566]

4 minutes ago, SpaceCadet said:

 

Just medical marijuana. 

I thought we were discussing what should be done, not what might just about get past the Daily Mail in about 20 years

[Dr Gloom 22134]

...walked around in circles in a k maze.