'Puppy prozac cured my dog's anxiety'
Almost nine million Brits are currently taking antidepressants - but it's not just humans who need help. Vets have reported a huge surge in prescriptions of 'puppy Prozac', as owners use medication to help treat their dog's behavioural issues. That includes Emma Reed, who says they've cured her cockapoo Chester of his social anxiety. But is medication really the best option? Emma will be joining us alongside vet Sean McCormack.
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New Statesman
3 hours ago
- New Statesman
How Britain fell into the K-hole
When we hear that Elon Musk was prescribed ketamine, as he admitted in 2024, what are we supposed to conclude? Is it a sign that ketamine has entered the mainstream of 21st-century culture? Is it a part of a Silicon Valley wellness vogue, or illicit drug culture? Does it connect to Musk's nihilistic right-wing politics, or to the rainbow psychedelia of Burning Man? Is it therapy, or is ketamine itself the problem? Ketamine has certainly entered the mainstream of cultural reference, and the mainstream of recreational life, in the UK as well as the US. An estimated 269,000 Brits aged 16-59 years old used the drug in the year ending March 2024. But despite its prevalence, there remains little consensus about what the drug represents, or indeed what it actually does. Opium had Thomas De Quincey, acid had Hunter S Thompson, but no laureate of ketamine has yet emerged to guide the curious reader through the experience or share the insights that changed their life. Casual observers may have some impression of what a ketamine user looks like from the outside – somewhere on a spectrum from stumbling to comatose – but little idea of the state of consciousness they are experiencing. But we might have expected this. Unlike, say, cannabis, cocaine or mushrooms, ketamine has no deep history or hinterland: it is a product of pharmaceutical modernity. In the last 50 years, however, it has been put to many different uses, accruing layers of meaning that bleed across one another: from medicine to drug of abuse, dancefloor high to mystical experience. Its multiple identities mirror the broad spectrum of its effects. Depending on the dose and method of administration, it can be anything from a mild and pleasant giddiness to a white-knuckle ride into another dimension. Nonetheless, there is something about the experience of ketamine that is uniquely resistant to description. It lacks the signature qualities of other psychedelics; there are no recognisable visual motifs or classic movie depictions of ketamine trips. Its hallmarks are a dissociation of mind from body, felt in large doses as an intense acceleration into an inner space where sensation, dream and memory blur. Time and space become unmoored, reality seems to be constantly shifting; after 20 minutes or so, the pace slows and the external world gradually reasserts itself. The experience is pin-sharp and vivid in the moment but elusive in hindsight, like returning to consciousness after an anaesthetic. Which, in fact, is exactly what's happening. In its original incarnation ketamine was a surgical anaesthetic, developed by Parke-Davis (once America's oldest and largest drug maker) and first deployed in the early 1970s, notably in the Vietnam War. It was ideal for military use because, unlike most anaesthetics of the day, it didn't require continuous infusion or special breathing apparatus: a simple intramuscular injection was enough to separate consciousness from body for the duration of an emergency procedure. Its disadvantage, however, was what became known as 'emergence reactions': on regaining consciousness, patients complained of confusion and nightmarish hallucinations. A new generation of anaesthetics, notably Propofol, soon came onstream to replace it, and ketamine found its place in veterinary surgeries, where the patients registered no complaints about its side effects. My first sight of ketamine was in the late 1980s, in the south of France, when a troubled rich-kid movie producer from California produced a medical vial of clear liquid and a needle and announced that this was the latest miracle treatment for substance abuse. He had been given it by John Lilly, the cybernetics and consciousness researcher who had famously taken huge doses of LSD in a sensory deprivation tank. 'Vitamin K', as it was often referred to in these circles, was one of several novel mind-altering compounds that had recently emerged from the clandestine West Coast network of underground chemists and psychotherapists. Others, most of them known by a cryptic alphabet soup of initials, would turn out to include MDMA, or ecstasy. If emergence reactions were unwelcome in Vietnam, to the psychedelic underground they were not a bug but an infinitely fascinating feature. Lilly was among the early adopters to discover that 150mg of injected ketamine, around a quarter of the full anaesthetic dose, catapulted the user almost immediately into an experience comparable in intensity to the peak of a huge LSD trip. Taking multiple doses in his sensory deprivation tank, Lilly left his body 'floating in a tank on the planet Earth' and conversed with extra-terrestrial intelligences as they ushered him through an ever-expanding series of alternate universes. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Gradually a new generation of researchers, including the psychiatrist Karl Jansen, based in Maudsley Hospital in London, began to investigate ketamine's phenomenological properties by interviewing users and recording their testimonies. Subjects spoke of immersion in dazzling white light, rollercoaster rides through the cosmos, lucid dreams, telepathy, meeting their higher selves and becoming God. Jansen wrote a book, Ketamine: Dreams and Realities (2004), and joined a small vanguard of therapists who took advantage of ketamine's status as a licensed medicine to incorporate the experience into psychotherapy, harnessing it to treat alcohol and other addictions. By this time, however, it was clear that ketamine had its own addictive potential. John Lilly was taking it compulsively to connect with his extra-terrestrials, and became convinced that he was a time traveller from the year 3001; his friends and family were obliged to stop him from trying to return to the future for good by hiding his supply and eventually checking him into a psychiatric hospital. Another early advocate was Marcia Moore, a yoga teacher and therapist who explored the drug extensively with her anaesthetist husband, and whose memoir Journeys into the Bright World (1978) remains one of very few sustained attempts to write the ketamine experience. Moore likely froze to death after taking a huge dose in a snow-covered forest in Washington state, and her husband withdrew her book from circulation. By the early Nineties ketamine had entered the UK and was circulating in London, along with the new wave of 'designer drugs', among the psychedelic vanguard of the ecstasy generation. I remember its first devotees as cerebral types, often maths, chess or computing obsessives who became compulsive explorers of its Escher-esque inner worlds. They were astonished to learn that people were taking it in techno clubs: how could you dance while you were having an out-of-body experience? But ketamine, not for the last time, was in the process of taking on another identity, together with a new physical form. The pharmaceutical vials of liquid solution were being replaced by wraps of powder, thanks to the discovery that ketamine was legally available from veterinary suppliers in India. A litre could be brought back on a plane in a drinking water bottle and, when evaporated in a low oven, converted into a mound of fluffy, crystalline white needles, which would cover the cost of the next exotic holiday. The convenience of the powder form made ketamine a staple of dance and rave events. Small sniffs or 'bumps' could be shared on the dancefloor and, especially when combined with ecstasy, produced an agreeably woozy, floaty sensation, like dancing on the moon. It could equally be mixed with cocaine, the cocktail known as a Calvin Klein ('C' plus 'K'), which tempered its dissociative effects with a stimulant and euphoric buzz that sharpened physical, verbal, social or sexual engagement. [See also: Inside the psychedelic elite] All this time ketamine had been quasi-legal, a licensed veterinary product but not a banned drug: a status reflected in its seemingly obligatory media labelling as a 'horse tranquillizer'. By 2005, however, its presence had become too conspicuous to ignore, and it was added to class C of the controlled drug schedules by Tony Blair's government. The effect, as usual, was the opposite of control. Organised crime moved in to supply it along with MDMA and cocaine, spreading it further into the mainstream of the era's booming drug culture. At first, the risk of addiction was considered the main danger of ketamine. The occasional deaths associated with it were typically the consequence of temporary incapacity, for instance drowning in the bath under its influence, a risk now all too familiar after Matthew Perry's highly publicised death in 2023. But in 2007, an entirely unsuspected risk of chronic use was described for the first time: 'ketamine bladder', a syndrome of damage to the lower urinary tract, which in serious cases requires reconstructive surgery or a urostomy bag. In its days as a surgical anaesthetic, patients had never used ketamine regularly enough to make this side effect apparent. From this point on, it became a significant health harm for a growing cohort of heavy users. The mid-2000s was the era that shaped ketamine's enduring image: at once illegal, medically risky, and wildly popular. Its ascendancy as a club drug was indicated by the emergence of dubstep, a genre that was immediately identified as both cause and effect of its spread. Like the drug itself, the sound combined a compulsive rush with a dislocated, mechanised aesthetic, darker and more disembodied than the ecstasy-fuelled styles that preceded it. The term 'wonky' emerged to describe both the music and the chemical dissociation that enhanced it. Literary accounts of ketamine remained elusive, but the drug now had its bespoke soundtrack. In 2014 the UK government responded to its growing popularity by raising its legal status to class B. Since then, levels of use have continued to climb, most sharply among 18- to 24-year-olds, whose usage has tripled in the last nine years. Yet ketamine continued to shapeshift. Just as it consolidated its image as a cheap and disreputable club drug, the psychedelic renaissance arrived with grand claims for its potential as an adjunct to psychotherapy, amplified by celebrity endorsements across the spectrum from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ryan Reynolds, Michael Phelps to Sharon Osbourne. Unlike psilocybin, MDMA and the other psychedelics being promoted for this purpose, it had the advantage of being already licensed as a medicine, which meant that psychotherapists could administer it legally. In the US, particularly California, ketamine clinics mushroomed into a healthcare sector now valued at almost $4bn. Their use of the drug was off-label, meaning that it was only accessible to private patients, typically at hundreds of dollars per dose. Some now offer it by mail order and administer the accompanying therapy via a phone call; others sell it with no therapy component at all. The first UK ketamine clinic, Awakn, opened in Bristol in 2020, charging £6,000 for a course of injections in a clinical setting for the treatment of anxiety, depression, PTSD and addiction. But it closed down in 2024 because of struggles to recruit private patients, and following an allegation of sexual misconduct against its most prominent practitioner. There are, however, many who have found ketamine invaluable for treating depression and PTSD without professional help. How it works is unclear – psychiatrists often resort to the old metaphors used for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), 'whacking the TV set' or 'shaking the snow globe' – but it seems to offer a jolt that disrupts fixed and overly rigid patterns of thinking. If its action is essentially physiological, as this suggests, it's no surprise that many choose to self-medicate rather than seek mental healthcare that is unaffordable for most and unavailable on the NHS. There is no waiting list for ketamine. With the advent of the dark web, and now the profusion of social media channels such as Telegram and bot sites that make it simple to call up 24-hour delivery via your phone, the drug is more readily available than ever. Jeet Heer recently reaffirmed in the Nation that it is 'the drug of our time', as cannabis was to the Sixties or cocaine to the Seventies. But its prevalence doesn't reflect a single social trend so much as the diversity of niches it has colonised across 21st-century culture. In different doses and contexts, it can be a social lubricant or an intense visionary experience, a blast of sublime confusion or a psychiatric medication. For all these, its essential promise is that it will – reliably, briefly and relatively safely – make reality feel very different. Web-based distribution has personalised and atomised the contexts in which ketamine is used; it is now, like the internet itself, something of an every-drug. Many of the niches it now occupies existed already, created by other substances. As a relief from depression or anxiety, it serves a similar purpose to sedatives such as Xanax or Valium; as a rocket ship to inner space, it rivals other short-acting psychedelics such as DMT; as an aid to psychotherapy, it compares to MDMA or psilocybin; as a dancefloor party-starter, to cocaine. At the most desperate end of the spectrum, it has established itself firmly in the bargain-basement niche for oblivion-seekers once claimed by glue and solvents. The pandemic played havoc with drug supply chains and mass socialising, but ketamine seems to have benefited from it: wastewater surveys suggest that its use in Britain has increased as much as 85 per cent in the last few years. For those who withdrew into their screens and their bedrooms, it was private and easily manageable even at large doses, and it has now overtaken MDMA in popularity among 18- to 24-year-olds. For those who find social events enervating or overwhelming in the wake of the lockdowns, it offers a 20-minute respite in the corner of a crowded party. For others, it makes it easier to tolerate bleak living conditions, overcrowding and fuel poverty. Underpinning all these selling points is a simple one: ketamine remains cheap, at £20 a gram or less, enough for a mind-bending session for a few friends at less than the price of a round of beers. In a sense it has become the alcohol of drug culture: ubiquitous and multi-purpose, both social and antisocial. Like alcohol, the balance of its health consequences is undoubtedly negative, but it's not hard to understand its appeal as a holiday from reality, an accompaniment to a wide range of pleasures, or a palliative for what ails you. [See also: British psychiatry on the brink] Related
Daily Mirror
6 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Warning to anyone eating chicken from the fridge in strict storage rule
Chicken leftovers are a great way to reduce food wastage, but experts say there are three key warning signs the meat is past its best Storing leftover chicken is a touchy subject among Brits - it's a meat that can spoil quickly, and the impacts of eating gone-off chicken are just hideous. If you're always having leftovers or would rather batch cook to save some of your time, and chicken is one of your go-to protein sources, you might want to take notes on how to store it safely. We've all had our doubts whenever we've pulled out a cooked chicken from the fridge from a few days ago. When it comes to cooking, after storage, certain foods can give you a stomach ache and even food poisoning. READ MORE: Lemons stay fresh for a month if kept in unlikely kitchen location How long does cooked chicken last in the fridge According to Real Simple, cooked chicken can stay in the fridge for up to four days. After it's been a few days, simply assess the condition and decide whether it's safe for you to eat it. When examining the chicken, you must check for three things, it says. It explained: 'If the chicken is not yet showing any signs of spoilage (poor smell, smile, or discolouration), you may still be able to eat it or freeze it to preserve it longer.' You can check if the chicken (and any meat) has gone bad by smelling it and also checking its colour. Spoiled chicken has an unpleasant smell and a slimy texture, and it might also have turned grey or green. If in doubt, just throw it away If the chicken is still okay to consume, the site said to thoroughly cook it again to an internal temperature of 73 degrees Celsius to make sure that it's safe to eat. Can you store raw chicken in the freezer? Many households are trying to find different ways to extend the shelf-life of their freshly-store-bought produce. If it has been a couple of days since the raw chicken has been sitting in the fridge, and you're worried about it going bad, freezing it is an option to prolong its consumption. As per the website, raw chicken can last up to nine months when stored in the freezer. However, it's important to freeze it within a day or store after bringing it home from the supermarket. To do so, use a vacuum-sealed bag or an air-tight container. Also, make sure to package it correctly to maintain its freshness and quality and labelling it accordingly can help you know when it's time to finally chuck it out - or whether it's still ok to eat.
Scottish Sun
12 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
How often women should have sex to be their happiest revealed in major study
Scroll down to discover which kind of women were most likely to be sexually satisfied JOY OF SEX How often women should have sex to be their happiest revealed in major study Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A WEEKLY romp is the key to a woman's happiness, according to a study. Women rated their relationship satisfaction highest if they had sex at least once a week, with 85 per cent pleased with their lot. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up That compared to 66 per cent for wives and girlfriends who got it on once a month, and 17 per cent who did it less than that. Study author Alexandra Janssen, from the University of Manchester, said: 'Women having sex less than once a week were far less likely to be satisfied in their sexual relationships. "Therapists working with women to improve their sexual relationship satisfaction might focus on increasing the frequency of sex.' The study questioned 483 women in New Zealand who had been in a relationship within the past year. Read More on sex DEAR DEIDRE I found out my partner is married when he called me by another name during sex Just over half — 56 per cent — said they were sexually satisfied. Results showed that satisfaction was higher if they had sex more often, had more orgasms, rated sex as an important aspect of their life and were younger. About six in ten Brits have sex less often than once a week, polling by YouGov shows. Ten per cent say they get lucky weekly and about another 15 per cent claim to do it more often. Writing in the International Journal of Sexual Health, Ms Janssen said: 'Sexual intimacy plays an important role in romantic relationships. 'In our study, less frequent sex was associated with a lower likelihood of sexual relationship satisfaction. Women who reported having sex one to two times a month were approximately three times less likely to be satisfied than those having sex two or more times a week. The benefits of having sex 'This effect was even more pronounced for women who reported having sex less than once a month, who were 25 times less likely to be satisfied.' Women aged 18 to 24 were most likely to be sexually satisfied and over-45s least likely. Those who rated sex as very important also had happier love lives than those who did not. Ms Janssen said: 'It seems unlikely that low self-rated importance of sex causes low sexual satisfaction. That may cause women to rate the importance of sex as low as a coping strategy.'
