What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/ketamine-effects-elon-musk/681911/

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https://archive.li/tHRvs

Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.
Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior.

Last year, Musk told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has a ketamine prescription and uses the drug roughly every other week to help with depression symptoms. When Lemon asked if Musk ever abused ketamine, Musk replied, “I don’t think so. If you use too much ketamine you can’t really get work done,” then said that investors in his companies should want him to keep up his drug regimen. Not everyone is convinced. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk also takes the drug recreationally, and in 2023, Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that Musk’s “associates” worried that ketamine, “alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.” (Musk did not respond to my requests for comment. In a post on X responding to The New Yorker’s story, Musk wrote, “Tragic that Ronan Farrow is a puppet of the establishment and against the people.”)

Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. You can see why people might wonder about ketamine use from a man who is trying to usher in multi-planetary human life, who has barged into global politics and is attempting to reengineer the U.S. government. With Musk’s new political power, his cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans. His late-night posts on X, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use.

Ketamine’s great strength has always been its ability to sever humans from the world around them. It was first approved as an anesthetic in 1970, because it could make people lose consciousness without affecting the quality of their breathing. In the 1990s, as a street drug known as Special K, ketamine took ravers to euphoric states. Then, in the 2000s, researchers found that doses of ketamine that didn’t put people to sleep could rapidly reduce symptoms of depression, because, the thinking went, the drug altered the physical circuitry of the brain. In 2019, the FDA approved a nasal spray containing a form of ketamine called esketamine (sold under the brand name Spravato) for patients with depression who hadn’t responded to other treatments. Spravato came with a list of rules for how the drug should be administered: in a certified medical setting by a health-care professional, and with limited dosage amounts determined by how long a person has been in treatment.

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