When I got Shayla Love on the line, I wanted her to describe in detail how ketamine can make you feel.

And this comes from interviewing lots and lots of people who have taken it both for trying to treat depression symptoms and also for fun and taking it at raves and dance parties.

Shayla's a science journalist, and she's done a lot of reporting on ketamine.

She wrote a great story in the Atlantic about ketamine's effects on the human brain.

It's called it dissociative, and the reason it's called that is it can make you feel sort of detached from your body. So sometimes that

means your limbs feel really big. Sometimes it means your body sort of floats away from you. You

float away from your body. It can also lead to feelings of like euphoria. Your thoughts can feel

really special and magical. And at lower doses, it can be a little bit like being tipsy or being drunk.

It's a really effective anesthetic. A few years ago, I was in the emergency room, and a teenage kid next to me had dislocated his thumb playing basketball.

He got a ketamine dose before the doctors maneuvered his thumb back into its socket.

The reason that people take it in the hospital is that it's FDA approved as an anesthetic. So if you

take it a really high dose, you will lose consciousness. It's a very good anesthetic because you can be

asleep and it won't affect your breathing. I also know people who have gotten great relief for

their depression with ketamine. The FDA approved version for depression is called spravato,

and that is a different form of ketamine called s-ketamine. And it feels roughly the same,

but this is at lower doses that they're using it for depression purposes. But then there's the question of high

dosing or extremely regular use and what that can do to our brain. I think a lot of people have

heard about the phrase k-hole and that is when you take a lot of ketamine and you sort of lose

touch with your surroundings altogether. So you're not really under anesthesia, but you are kind of dissociated enough that you're completely detached from the world all around you.

And that's what happens if you can take too too much.

These are doses that are not really used therapeutically, but they can happen recreationally, certainly, all the time.

In this story you wrote about ketamine for the Atlantic,

...