Comment by _fat_santa

I had a Ketamine infusion done at a clinic in Miami.

It was $600 (discounted) for the first infusion.

You go through a pre-evaluation with the doctor, where they determine a dosage for you based on prior experience and bodyweight.

My clinic also offered to co-administer IV benzos to prevent panic attacks or negative experiences, which was a HUGE plus for me.

During the experience you're given a button, which you can press to call them and have the drip turned off or turned down.

If it wasn't so expensive or covered by my insurance, I would've certainly repeated it.

Highly recommend.

Only a little. Not enough to serve as an escape hatch. It depends on the infusion rate, of course, but you’re talking a difference of maybe 15-20 minutes.

You're much safer and cheaper buying Ketamine from the darknet via a reputable vendor.

You get to decide whether you want racemic or S-Ketamine, and your money is held in escrow until you've got the product and release the funds to the vendor.

"But maybe the documentary I saw was biased."

Seems like it.

I did it one time and there was no vomitting and feeling great the day after.

But that maybe was, because the plant that was used was apparently not so strong. So yes, it is from natural plants, that can have very different concentrations. I suppose this is what the documentary means with life threatening poisening? Getting a plant that had a unusual high concentration?

But I never heard of those horror stories from people who do it regulary. (Vomitting is quite normal, though) Otherwise I have limited knowledge in that area, but I do know with mushrooms for example, you can use different ones of the same species to mix them to average out concentration differences. I assume the same can be done with Ayuahasca. But like I said, I would not recommend the commercial retreats anyway.

(I did it when I was invited into a ceremony in a remote place by people who were not frauds)

With pharmahuasca or ayahuasca analogues maybe. With a normal/traditional brew it's essentially impossible to overdose (think like 3-4 liters of the stuff). Analogues like syrian rue are a lot easier to overdose though, it's a pretty small amount of material needed.

Also the vast majority of people are done purging within a few hours...not "days"

(Source: work at retreat center and have drank hundreds of times)

True, I should have qualified "actual" duration, not perceived duration!

Psychedelics challenge the post-Enlightenment project of "rational" adulthood. Western civilization has a deep myth: the myth of necessary order - a yoking of rationality, order, and progress together into what forms the basis for modernity. Psychedelics cannot have intrinsic value outside of rationality, so, they must either be accepted on the basis of rationality and order or face rejection. We express this using the rational basis of improved mental health. The contradiction of course is obvious; psychedelics provide us with profoundly irrational experiences that don't obviously fit into our cultural value system.

The point is that western civilization values rationality, order, and progress in a self-justifying way. The values that our culture provides to us form a feedback cycle of myth and virtue. Every argument that assumes this basis, reinforces its truth.

"Order is obviously preferable to chaos", is one of many subjective perspectives. Why should it hold more truth than "Plurality of perspectives are obviously preferable to the fragility of one perspective for the sake of objectivity"? The apparatuses of the state[1] all rely on the same cultural myth and promote it in a way that crowds out all possible alternatives. Thus the myth of necessary order has become synonymous with reality.

Like all deeply rooted cultural myths, this is something that's going to appear obviously true which coincidentally serves as a way of shielding it from honest critique. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that questioning foundational myths feels like a cultural violation. René Girard’s theory holds; when a community is anxious or unstable, it lashes out most viciously at people who somehow threaten its central, but unspoken, truths or anxieties. The greater the received response that a cultural axiom obviously true; the more certain I am that it reflects a core cultural myth than any semblance of reality.

1. See Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970.

It's a joke. People often have conspiracy theories about Big Pharma trying to prevent access to novel drugs that could disrupt their cash cows. The parent was jokingly talking about "Big Reality" as an imaginary group of people who hate to see "reality" disrupted by psychedelic experiences.

For those who don't remember what it was like when LSD was still legal, this is an accurate synopsis of what could be observed as it quickly was prohibited to the max degree and categorized along with truly more toxic dangerous drugs like opiates. When things like opiates had been recognized for their potentially devastating effects for thousands of years, while psychedelics were still experimental substances.

Realistically an entire new agency (DEA) was chartered to enforce the new regulations, and the greatest threats were those thought to disrupt an "ordained" vision of reality that was not to include the kind of experimentation which made clinical evaluation possible.

Rapidly, before the most thorough experiments could be conducted which would have more accurately informed the established pharma regulation process.

Rather it was superstition that was included in the new regulations, and the enforcement agency was mustered to fight to preserve more superstition than should ever be allowed.

This really really stands the test of time, and if kelsey did not personally observe this phenomenon, it's even more amazing than it appears on the surface.

The Human-Equivalent Dose for IV administration is roughly ~300mg for a 100kg human.