TITLE
Ketamine: Miracle Cure, or the Next Addiction Epidemic?

ABSTRACT
Thanks to ketamine's ability to produce a "rapid anti depressant effect", some researchers are heralding it as a "miracle cure" for treatment resistant depression and a host of other conditions, from childhood trauma to anxiety and more. Doctors are endorsing the treatment - and clinics and drug companies are looking to cash in.

But should they be paying closer attention to the history of recreational ketamine use in the UK, Hong Kong and Taiwan? The drug can be profoundly addictive, with an extremely high tolerance profile - epidemics of addiction were recorded around the world as far back as 2000, with horrific consequences for those ensnared by its hooks. Lest we forget, "heroin" was sold as a non-addictive to morphine, and Oxycontin was sold on the basis of it too being "non addictive". Will ketamine just be the next source of an uncontrollable epidemic in America?

BIOGRAPHY
Zoe Cormier is an author, journalist, science writer, broadcaster and public speaker with an academic training in zoology coupled with an upbringing in the music industry. Her first book, Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll: The Science of Hedonism and the Hedonism of Science, was published by Profile Books in 2014, hand-picked by The Guardian as a “must-read science book”, and ranked as the 7th best book of 2014 by legendary record shop Rough Trade. Her journalism has appeared in the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, Nature, Scientific American, Wired, Vice, and more. She is the only writer in the world who can say with full honesty, "Rolling Stone magazine paid me to take acid" - and she is the only person who has posed naked for New Scientist.