Is Ketamine the Drug of the Moment?

It was Halloween on the weekend in Sydney, and while Heidi Klum was flopping around on a red carpet in a terrifying worm costume (we love her for it), and the innocent youth were trick-or-treating from door to door, those in search of more adult activities were looking to enhance their night in other ways.

I’m talking about drugs, if that wasn’t clear. 

But gallivanting the streets from party to party led me to a clear realisation: Amongst the ghouls and ghosts, not a bag of coke was in sight (or much of anything else for that matter), and further, those who may have bought a bag of the expensive stuff regretted it. It was all K.

Living in a housing crisis and an era of stagnating wages, there isn’t that much wiggle room to splash on a drug like coke: so hit-or-miss that its exorbitant fee doesn’t seem like a good price to pay. And unlike MDMA, that nasty comedown the next day doesn’t seem to hit as hard.

If you take it down to a street level, and ask the people that actually use it, their reasons more or less align. 

“I think it’s cheaper and the drug of the moment,” Hannah*, 26, told VICE.

“Good coke these days is hard to find, whereas Ket is easy and cheap. So it makes sense why students with less money are choosing that over a 300/350 bag.”

It’s a general consensus these days that the quality of coke has decreased. In fact, a few months ago, CanTest – Australia’s first government-backed pill testing service – found that 40% of coke tested wasn’t real coke. 

“Coke in Australia is shit,” Kelly*, 23, tells VICE.

“[Ketamine] doesn’t affect you the next day or give you comedowns like MDMA.”

While the preference for ketamine isn’t new, its rise in recent years is actually backed by science. 

According to the National Drug Strategy Household Survey from 2019, released every three years, the amount of people using ketamine doubled between 2016 to 2019 (0.4 percent of the population to 0.9 percent), with people in their 20’s the most likely to use.

And even more recently, the Australian Drug Trend report of 2022, from the University of New South Wales National Drug and Alcohol Research, found that there’s been a steady incline since 2009, with the amount of people who regularly use ketamine rising by 21 percent in COVID-19 lockdowns. The report also found that ketamine was getting easier to obtain, from “difficult” in 2020 to “easy” in 2022.

The numbers don’t lie. 

It makes sense that for a generation low on funds and slowly dissociating from the bleak world around us that many would want bang for their buck, and also, a little escape. While many may not agree (“Nah, K is not replacing coke,” said Ray*, 26, “Dexies are replacing coke.”) there seems to be a general consensus that K has become the drug of choice. It’s where price and potency collide.

As Jess*, 24, said to VICE:

“Personally, I also prefer to feel relaxed when I’m socialising and partying to soothe any social anxiety – and K offers me that, whereas coke doesn’t.”

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