Ketamine: experiences

This section is for first-hand accounts of ketamine: what was taken, by which route, in what company, and what happened. The archives below hold thousands of K-hole stories. What they hold far less of is the ordinary nights, the creeping habits, and the bladders — and those are the reports worth writing.

How to read an experience report

An anecdote is one person, once, and ketamine adds two distortions of its own. First, the drug impairs its own witness: dissociation, amnesia and time distortion are the effects, so a written account is a reconstruction, sometimes assembled afterwards from what other people said. Second, ketamine's worst-documented harm is nearly invisible in this format. Bladder and urinary-tract damage builds over months of frequent use, not in one evening, so no single trip report contains it — a vault full of vivid single-night accounts says nothing about what a habit does. Route matters when comparing reports (snorted, swallowed and injected ketamine are different exposures), and so does what the powder actually was: material sold as ketamine is not always ketamine, and reports that mention testing are telling you more than reports that don't.

How to write one worth reading

The route, the amount in milligrams if it was actually measured, whether you redosed, and how often you use — a monthly session and a daily habit are different stories, and the second one is rarer in writing and more valuable. Say whether you were alone (people drown in bathtubs on ketamine; our interactions page carries the official advice not to use alone), and what else was in the picture — alcohol, opioids or benzodiazepines around ketamine are the combination the depressant warnings are about. Describe the day after, not just the hole. And if frequent use ever gave you urinary symptoms, write that report: it is the least glamorous account anyone can file here and the most likely to change what someone else does.

The archives

• Erowid's ketamine experience vault — the largest collection, sorted from glowing to "Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters"; the disasters and the addiction shelf are the instructive ones.
• Erowid's ketamine vault — the reference around the reports: basics, effects, health concerns, law.
• PsychonautWiki's ketamine article — a community-written map of the subjective effects. Collected experience, not a checked source.

The chemistry, dosage, interactions, and legal sections of this area carry what the evidence supports, with citations. This page is for what happened to you.