K Generation

A drug that leaves its users incapacitated has found a home with the most driven generation on earth… Alexandra Jones investigates how, and why, ketamine has millennials hooked.

- Alexandra Jones

The first time I took ketamine I was 19. A mound of white powder – not perfectly fine, but granular, like sugar – half the size of my smallest fingernail, poured onto the tip of a key. I held it to my nose, sniffed and it was gone. It was May, near dawn, and a pale light sliced through the blinds. It was quiet for a house party – people sitting in silence, staring at something just beyond their eyes that I couldn’t see. Those that were talking did so in whispers.

Everything about my body just felt nice, pleasant.

“Is this it?” I asked. “Pretty much,” replied one of my friends. “It’s like…” He searched hard for the words. “Ultimate floaty. You feel bouncy, your whole body is light as air.”

This is probably one of the best ways to describe a good ketamine experience. Worries – about graduating and careers, about the mess of life that was waiting to happen outside that house and that night – slipped away, and time felt slower. Thoughts flew through my head at random; sentences half-formed then unformed before I could articulate them. For 30 minutes, a door to another way of being cracked open. And then, just as quickly, it closed again, and everything went back to normal – until the next key came my way…

At the time, 2007, ketamine was an after party drug – something that gave you a buzz, but didn’t keep you awake. Back then, we lived for the after party. Towards the end of university, as we all panicked about impending unemployment, going out became a perfunctory act. Because what we all really wanted to do was head back to a friend’s, take some K and make our minds as blank as a sheet of paper.