(2 of 3)
All this attention has alarmed people like Lieutenant Bill Queen, who works narcotics in the Pinellas County sheriff's office, near Tampa Bay. He had never heard of K before December. Now, his undercover officers can buy it every week. "These kids don't know what they're getting into," says Queen. "But I can tell you, this is another drug that's going to be abused and cause harm." What really steams officer Queen is that he can't do much about it. Snorting K may be foolish, but it's not a felony. If someone without a medical or veterinary license is caught with ketamine in Florida, the maximum sentence is 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. Only a handful of state's attorneys have taken the time to prosecute K cases when the stakes are so tiny. For his part, Queen hasn't arrested anyone with K. "We could," he says, "but we're waiting," gathering evidence against dealers who sell it to his undercover cops. Next year, the legislature will consider a bill to "schedule" ketamine as a controlled substance, which would stiffen penalties.
A swift and simple solution, right? Well, no. Outlawing drugs like LSD (in the 1960s) and Ecstasy (in the 1980s) was easy since they have no government-acknowledged medical use and aren't made by licensed firms. But ketamine and other drugs that are actually medicines are different. Senator Joseph Biden discovered how delicate drug politics can be last year when he designed a bill to control ketamine and the so-called date-rape drug Rohypnol more closely. At the time, rapists' use of the latter to sedate victims had sparked an outcry, but the Rohypnol-controlling part of the legislation died under pharmaceutical-industry pressure. The industry, whose political action committees last year donated $2.1 million to Republican candidates and $714,000 to Democrats, doesn't want the added administrative burdens and federal oversight that come with scheduling a drug as a controlled substance. (Rohypnol was already scheduled, but the bill would have regulated it further.) Each unit of a scheduled drug must be scrupulously accounted for, and some doctors won't prescribe drugs stigmatized by that heavy designation. In the case of ketamine, neither Parke-Davis, which developed the drug, nor Fort Dodge Laboratories, which makes the veterinary brand Ketaset, opposes tighter restrictions. But the industry's supporters in Congress are loath to change industry-friendly precedent, which allows drugs to be scheduled only after lengthy administrative review. (States are more willing to flout industry wishes. So far, eight have added the drug to their books.)
Lost in these political battles is a basic question: is ketamine really dangerous? Maybe not. The British government decided not to closely restrict ketamine because it could not prove that K's effects were severe. Most drug-overdose deaths result from circulatory or respiratory failure, and ketamine doesn't usually depress these functions. Dr. Alex Stalcup, medical director of a California drug-treatment center, says the effects of K are "basically like being really, really drunk. It's really not a demon, not compared with the other stuff we're seeing with kids now," including smokable versions of heroin and speed.