No one takes ketamine for its delectable taste. The acrid mix of spit and powder that slaloms its way down the back of a user's throat after snorting it is infamously disgusting -- yet, in the ever-innovative drugs black market, one distributor may have found a solution.
Over the weekend, VICE gained access to a WhatsApp message sent by a London-based dealer offering a medley of fruit-flavored batches of the drug. The menu boasts four options: Purple Grape, Orange Peach, Green Watermelon, and Red Raspberry. There's no taste hierarchy: each is selling for £30 per gram, a touch more expensive than typical London prices, which generally range from £20 and £25, suggesting the flavor adds a premium.
Flavored ketamine lozenges and oral solutions, used for pain relief, have long been available on the medicinal market. But this is the first report of flavored ketamine powder appearing on the menus of wares offered by the UK's night-stalking illegal dealers.
Flavor can be added to ketamine during the cooking process, when its liquid form is heated slowly until it crystallizes into powder and shards. Looking through online drug forums, vanilla extract seems to be the go-to choice. One Reddit user posted enthusiastically about its merits -- "Dude. Fire. Try it!" -- while another mentioned mint-flavored ketamine as an effective mask for the bitter taste of the dreaded drip. Another poster took an even more experimental route, adding maple syrup extract to their K so it "tasted like I was eating pancakes."
While most of these posts are at least five years old, the new flavors are very much a reflection of recent drug trends. The sweetening of powdered drugs appears to be an inevitable development in an era when bright colors and citrus candy tastes dominate the intoxicant industry. We've swapped beer for black cherry White Claws, cigarettes for triple mango vapes, and small, tasteless one-dose NOS canisters for blue raspberry-flavored Galaxy Gas. Everything now is marketed to be as sweet, as sour, and as neon as possible and the flavors on the London dealer's menu align perfectly with this trend.
There are parallels with the moral panic that surrounded the arrival of alcopops in the 1990s, when the tabloid media and professional catastrophizers admonished booze brands for the lurid designs and sugary taste of drinks like Hooch and WKD, insisting it was an attempt to turn school children into wisened alcoholics by stealth. Whether flavored ketamine provokes a similar uproar remains to be seen, though what does seem certain is that K users of all ages will appreciate this development, and the option not to feel as though they are inhaling liquidized coins slathered in bleach through their sinuses every other weekend.