My first experience with Ketamine occurred almost 10 years ago now, in Southern Cambodia of all places!
Sitting on a bus from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville in the South, I met a guy from the same country as myself and we got chatting.It later turned out that he had spent several months in China where his heroin habit had been carelessly nurtured and he was on a roundabout trip back home to get into rehab.Needless to say, and as is often the case, the topic of intoxicants came up and we found we had a fair bit in common.
We reached our destination, booked into a guesthouse and then hit the local chemists shop.Back then Cambodia was like a sweetshop for heads as you could just purchase stuff like pharmaceutical grade morphine tartrate for injection, diazepam,rohypnol,seconal, tuinal,dexedrine,ethyl-amphetamine and DXM in the same way you would purchase coffee or cigarettes.
We chat to the chemist and eventually we ask for ketamine.The shopkeeper raised his eyebrows, put his finger to his lips in a silencing motion and said in a low voice 'Ahhh ketamine? Confidential!'.
He nipped into the back of the shop then returned clutching a glass bottle containg 50mls of Bulgarian Ketamine, 50mg/ml, with the brandname 'Calypsol' and an expiry date some 6 weeks away.He passed it to us and said '100mg, no more,no more!'.This cost us the princely sum of 10 US dollars.
We purchased clean works (and some rohypnol as well) and headed back.The guy I was with had taken it before and assured me that 75mg IM was more than enough.We were both familiar with using a needle and it held few qualms for us particularly as the K was pharmaceutical grade.
We load up 1.5mls of the juice in 2 syringes and dimmed the lights then hit each other up simultaneously into our deltoid muscles.It needs to be injected slowly as it can sting a bit.
What struck me was the speed at which it hit-by the time the needles had been withdrawn and rinsed out a deep sense of foreboding was evident after a minute or so.I lay back and then didnt speak for the next 40 minutes.
There is something ineffable about the experience.Visually its not anywhere near as impressive as DMT but it takes you far far beyond where DMT can take you as the disconnect factor is so profound it leaves all of the indole/tryptaminergic compounds way behind.I think it would be too much for someone who hadnt sampled the conventional psychedelics as they felt like simply a stepping stone to this place, a place where you really felt that you understood the 'true nature of things' with a totally dispassionate perspective.I think the fact that all bodily awareness is lost adds to the magic of this 'version of reality'.
I remember thinking 'Oh shit.I may have gone too far here.What if I die here and my parents have to come to Cambodia to fetch my corpse and take it back home....?'.Now a thought like this on the usual psychedelics would, for me, set off the spiral of negativity causing a major head-mash, but the K didnt cause anxiety in me and I accepted this thought with no sadness.
The memory fades with time but it was a most enjoyable experience but not in the same euphoric way as with LSD/psilocybin/DMT etc , it was more like looking at the whole of all that exists as an outside observer. So hard to do it justice in prose but imagine if you can, taking a large hit of DMT which pushes you to the point where there is nothing obviously useful to take from the experience.Ketamine kind of propels you beyond this where the concept of useful or useless has no meaning which strikes a chord with the user.
I have since tried K orally and it is vastly inferior to the IM route, and I wouldnt want to IV it as I suspect the onset would be unmanageably quick.
'Holiday in Cambodia'- the Dead Kennedys knew the score!!!
