All hooked on ketamine? | EUROtoday

On May 11, 2025

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EIt prices a median of half lower than cocaine. Like this, it may be sniffened and has lengthy been confined to technos festive environments. And to settle in consumption habits, she even borrowed her title and known as herself “pink cocaine” in 2022. Today, ketamine is more and more consumed for leisure functions in different contexts by younger adults.

Very helpful for human and animal anesthesia – and really framed on this medical context -, Ketamine has just lately been put beneath the highlight by Elon Musk, who assured consuming it to deal with his melancholy. In France, since 2019, it’s esketamine, one among its compounds, which is usually used to deal with resistant depressions.

But the hallucinatory results of that which is usually nicknamed the Special Okay have been identified because the Nineteen Nineties: “It creates a distortion of the visual and bodily perception, which can lead to dissociative states, even to decorporation effects. What consumers describe us is that they can see themselves from the top. In large quantities, it can lead to K-Hole, which is a coma, ”explains Catherine Delorme, president of the Addiction Federation.

And its consumption will increase in France. For her half, Joëlle Micallef, head of the scientific pharmacology division and pharmacosurveillance of the AP-HM, assures her: “I have been this product for a lot of time: a real turn has been taken in recent years. “The figures are right: several researchers based on data from the French addictavigilance network thus noted between 2012 and 2021 an” 2.5 increase in the number of ketamine users with a disorder of the use of substances [une addiction, NDLR] ».

All indicators upwards

According to the survey on representations, opinions and perceptions of psychotropic drugs (EROPP) of the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Trends, 2.6 % of 18-64 year olds have already consumed ketamine in their lives-0.9 % of young people aged 17. For Catherine Delorme, if these figures remain “far removed from the levels of cannabis or cocaine, it is not negligible. Especially since, when we look at more indirect indicators, we also see this increase: serious cases increase ”.

French addictovigilance facilities have thus collected 262 experiences in reference to ketamine between 2017 and 2020, towards 235 over fifteen years, between 2002 and 2017. Note that if these values appear weak, it’s as a result of addictology suffers from a robust sub-declaration: “It is estimated that lower than 1 % of the well being issues linked to the consumption of addictive substance are declared” Micallef.

An increase that can also be seen by leaning over the seizures of ketamine. At the end of March, 100 kilos of ketamine were seized in Bourg-en-Bresse (Ain). An article published on The Conversation site reports “almost 3,000 seizures carried out in Europe, for a complete of just about 2.79 t of ketamine” in 2022, a sign of significant circulation. The whole, while, according to the French observatory of drugs and addictive behaviors, ketamine is “little monitored, which limits the understanding of its consumption and its influence on public well being”.

Moreover, a number of European nations are affected. Joëlle Micallef underlines: “It is not a French specificity: the same trend is noted in England. And this has long been the same problem in Asia, especially in the Night-Clubs of Taiwan and Hong Kong, where ketamine was the second most consumed psychoactive substance after heroin in 2006. “

The average consumer is about 25 years old

And this increase mainly concerns young people. According to data from the French addictovigilance network, the average age of consumers is around 25.8 years and these are mainly male (67.5 %). 8.3 % of ketamine lovers are minor. A figure that does not surprise Dr. Benoit Peyronnet, urologist surgeon in Rennes and manager of the Urology and Perineology Committee of the Woman of the French Urology Association: the patients he receives for complications “are all between 18 and 25 years old”.

And if it was mainly confined to technos festive environments, the methods of taking have evolved. Joëlle Micallef underlines: “The profiles have diversified for five years. Some use it as part of Chemsex. Others say they consume it for self-therapeutic purposes to reduce their anxiety, improve their well-being, soothe pain, wean on alcohol … “without the effectiveness of ketamine being proven in these areas. Another major change: “Formerly punctual, uses have intensified. The number of daily sockets has doubled, going from 15 to 30 % in the 2020s. ”

Consequences on unknown health

One of the explanations for this runaway? The trend “upwards all hallucinating and stimulating artificial medication, within the normal inhabitants and in younger adults particularly”, confirms to the Point Nicolas Prisse, president of the interministerial mission to combat drugs and addictive behaviors. This makes it a “extra accessible, which is simpler to search out”, according to Joëlle Micallef.

Also and above all, health professionals note a great ignorance, among consumers, of the dangers of ketamine, to whom it is sold as a drug with almost instantaneous effects, but without any descent. Joëlle Micallef underlines: “In addictovigilance, there were eight deaths caused by ketamine. »»

The consequences on the kidneys and the bladder are the best known, and urologists are increasingly confronted with it: in five years, the Rennes University Hospital has recorded more than thirty serious cases (including twenty in the last two years). “Today, we have an average of a new patient with serious damage each month, not to mention phone calls for pain. And this is the case of all my colleagues everywhere in France today, ”underlines Dr Peyronnet. So much so that the French Urology Association had to publish national recommendations in September 2024 to guide professionals.

“They urinate as much as sixty occasions a day”

Because ketamine, to be evacuated from the organism, passes through the kidneys, the ureters (the canals which transport the reins of the kidneys to the bladder) and the bladder, and strongly damages all these organs in passing. “Patients arrive with crucial ache within the bladder, which turns into a terrific supply of struggling as quickly as it’s a little bit full, as a result of it’s now the scale of a dedication of a melon in regular occasions,” explains the urologist.

To uncover

The kangaroo of the day

Answer

With a capability of capability divided by ten or twenty, they urine “up to sixty times a day” and have blood in it. Consumers additionally harm their kidneys – “lose them”, within the worst case. And typically indicators a “vicious circle: as they are in pain, they continue to consume ketamine, which relieves them but which worsens their case”, deplores Dr. Peyronnet. The bile ducts also can endure from it, creating cholangites.

While ketamine has the popularity of not being addictive, for Dr Peyronnet, it’s typically “patients who have a lot of trouble to wean. Of the thirty serious cases that[‘il] Care, only two have really managed to do it sustainably and completely ”. In these two people, the bladder returned “virtually to their unique measurement”, and the pains have stopped. And to conclude: “The key’s actually that there isn’t a extra consumption. »»

https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/generation-z-tous-accros-a-la-ketamine-11-05-2025-2589321_23.php