Great article. I’ve worked on two hospice initiatives in my career, and my best friend’s mom was an RN who worked hospice for over a decade. I got to work closely with a woman named Susan in Colorado who led the hospice program for a large oncology group. It’s one of the hardest jobs in healthcare in my opinion, but it is a critical service for patients and their families. Susan told me she had a ritual, every day as she was leaving work she went to the restroom and washed her hands, so that she could remind herself not to take her work home.
I highly recommend an old episode of This American Life called Death & Taxes. Half of the show is about hospice and they do rounds for a week or so with hospice nurses.
I mean, assuming he had this large amount of ketamine in his system, he couldn’t have assumed it was actually good for him to use that much and without monitoring. It was basically assisted suicide. But the profit margin is concerning.
I know nothing about ketamine. How is it ingested? Could he plausibly not have known how much he was taking?
Had he been clean for a while? I know it’s common when a former addict has a relapse that they go back to their old dose. But they no longer have a tolerance for it so that’s when they’re most likely to OD. Wondering if that’s what happened to Matthew Perry.
I lost a high school pal that way and I hear it’s sadly very common.
Ketamine comes in a solution for oral use or intravenous for IV delivery.
It is very potent, which is why its so tightly controlled.
If you check the LD50 for Ketamine, you see that its about 11mg/kg IV (see below).
So, given that the standard IV dose for off-label treatment (depression, anxiety etc) is about 0.5mg/kg IV 2x/weekly (see below), they were probably giving the poor guy somewhere between 4-8mg/kg weekly via an IV drip in the aggregate sense (this could be done by doing dosing every other day for example at 2mg/kg), which caused his respiratory system to crash when ketamine levels in his blood increased to a high enough level.
