The United States has the makings of yet another drug crisis on its hands, thanks to the rise of ketamine.
Previously a favorite rave drug, ketamine’s now used more and more to treat pain, often as an IV-given drug, with prescriptions soaring more than 500% since 2017.
That rise is driven by telehealth providers and moneymaking clinics who tout its wide applicability to pain — the No. 1 reason for its prescription in every year over that time period.
Doctors and nurses can give the low-cost (less than $100 a vial) drug regardless of their training on and experience with it.
And a major chunk of those proceeds are in cash: Since the Food and Drug Administration has not approved any non-surgical use of ketamine, most insurers won’t cover it.
Those are similar to the perfect storm conditions that birthed our synthetic opioid crisis, now bearing fruit in the form of fentanyl pouring across our southern border and killing tens of thousands of Americans a year and tranq that literally rots the flesh of users.
Shockingly, the evidence that ketamine is much good at treating pain remains thin, especially in the forms it’s most easily available.
Or perhaps that’s not so shocking, given the utter incompetence our public health “experts” have displayed on every major recent issue from COVID to so-called “harm reduction.”
Consider the big fumble they already made on ketamine — extending a pandemic-era loophole allowing online prescribing until next year.
Thanks to federal-level indifference (and President Biden’s open-border policies), Americans are already dying from opioids in record numbers.
Their deaths wreck communities and rip apart the social fabric.
In our era where health policy is allegedly guided by “an abundance of caution”, how is it remotely possible that yet another drug epidemic is clearly being teed up?