Ketamine in Calgary
'Special K' pusher sells hour-long trips
Calgary Herald
Friday, May 9, 2003
Page: B1 / FRONT
Section: City & Region
Byline: Nick Lewis
Source: Calgary Herald
Jake is affable, intelligent and successful.
By day, he makes a decent salary working as a salesman
for a well-to-do company, selling wholesale
supplies to Calgary construction companies. He has a
nice car and a cellphone, owns a decent house in the
northwest and is surrounded by a healthy cadre of
friends.
He shrugs off the term "yuppie," as most yuppies do.
"My day job takes care of my day life, you know, rent,
insurance, savings, that kind of thing," the 29-year old
says. "That I don't touch."
His expensive weekends clubbing around Calgary's
nightspots are fuelled by selling drugs to a short clientele
list.
Ketamine, or "K" or "Special K" is an anesthetic used
by doctors and veterinarians. Its action is called
dissociative, which means the mind seems to separate
from the body, leaving the user in a detached,
hallucinogenic state. It's similar to LSD, but a
ketamine trip only lasts about 60 minutes instead of several
hours. In large doses, doctors say, it could be fatal.
On the street, you can buy it for about $35 for a
half-gram vial, approximately the same price as an equivalent
amount of cocaine.
Jake (not his real name) did a fair bit of research
before deciding this was the drug he would be comfortable
dealing.
Because ketamine, like morphine, is used safely in
medical practice, Jake knows that it is not illegal to
possess it.
"You won't get a criminal record if you get caught
with it," Jake says. "Because it's used as a painkiller. I looked
into it."
Sue Kendall, the deputy director of federal
prosecution service for the Department of Justice, says ketamine
does not fall under the Controlled Drugs and
Substances Act, which would make it illegal to possess.
"Ketamine is part of Schedule F in the Food and Drug
Act," Kendall says. "It is an offence under the Food and
Drug Act to sell any drug described in Schedule F, and
Schedule F includes ketamine. So that makes it an
offence, under the Food and Drug Act, to sell it."
But, "it's not an offence to possess it," she says.
Jake knows that if he's caught, he can always claim
the few grams he has with him are for personal use, not
trafficking.
Kendall says according to Section 31 of the Food and
Drug Act, a summary conviction for a first offence brings
a fine up to $5,000 or imprisonment up to three
months.
Even in the United States, ketamine is a Schedule 3
drug, the same as Tylenol-3 with codeine, which
accounts for the rise in its recreational use south of
the border.
Jake says he knows Calgary drug dealers who are
trafficking in cocaine and are now also selling ketamine.
Some are switching completely to ketamine. "As a
dealer, it's comparable in price and the profit margins are
similar, too," he says.
That's something Staff Sgt. Roger Chaffin, formerly of
Calgary's drug squad, is worried about. He says the
trafficking of ketamine is a criminal offence that
could result in jail time.
Chaffin says the misconceptions surrounding the
legalities of this pain-killer might contribute to its rise in
Calgary.
"In the last two years, it was a drug that we rarely
saw; it's one we see quite commonly now. (Although) on a
scale, it does not rival marijuana or cocaine; Calgary
is still dominated by the use of those."
Jake agrees that K is slowly becoming the drug of
choice on Calgary's partygoing scene.
"It's just coming into the scene, but it's the next
big thing. I know a lot of people who used to love cocaine who
don't do it anymore, who just do K.
"So it's a positive thing," Jake says, "because it's
taking people off harder drugs that do more damage to you."
Dr. Joel Fox is an anaesthesiologist at Foothills
Hospital who administers small doses of ketamine to
patients for pain relief, but only in rare cases. He
can't understand why anyone would want to use it
recreationally.
"The effect of the drug depends on the dose," he says.
"If you give a full dose the patient will have significant
pain control, but they will be unconscious. If you
reduce the dose -- and this is why street users use it, I
suspect -- they are getting some alteration in their
conscious level."
Jake explains his fascination with the drug.
"What happens is you go to a euphoric state, I call it
K-land," he says. "Everything is different and new. It's not
conducive to bad trips. You can't have a bad trip on
it. It's an anaesthetic, it's not designed to get you high. It's a
healing agent, made to numb you. It's comparable to
novocaine."
No, it's not, says Dr. Fox.
"If you inject novocaine into your thigh, a portion of
your thigh will be frozen and there will be no real systemic
affect," Fox says. "But if you inject ketamine into
your thigh, depending on the dose, you could fall down
unconscious and stop breathing."
Calgary Police say all the street drugs in the city,
including ketamine, are controlled by organized crime
groups.
But a deeper issue is how these legal drugs are
manufactured -- what you get on the street isn't what is
available for medical use in hospitals.
"The question to always ask is, who made this drug?"
Chaffin says. "Do you think it was made in a lab under
clinical supervision after years of FDA testing, or
was it made by an organized crime group trying to profit from
your addiction?"
Fox, the anaesthesiologist, says he'd be terrified
about measuring the right dose for recreational use.
"I'm very calculating when measuring someone's
kilograms and then deciding how much medication they
should get based on their body weight," the doctor
says. "I'd be terrified of giving someone one too many
crystals and having them overdose.
"That's their business, though -- they must be pretty
good at it or they'd be killing a lot more clients."
