A recent controversy about use of an injectable drug called ketamine by paramedics in emergency ambulance cases at Hennepin County hospital involving police has been reported. According to several articles from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune some “paramedics and civil rights investigators have independently expressed concern that Minneapolis police officers urged medical responders to use it to subdue members of the public when responding to difficult calls” (6/17/18).
Dr. Frank Bures
“Dr. William Heegaard, chief medical officer for Hennepin Healthcare (formerly HCMC), said that ketamine can save lives when dealing with those showing signs of ‘excited delirium’ a condition in which the person is severely agitated and aggressive. … It is a medication that is complex. It can be abused, and unfortunately that happens with almost all medications.”
The president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists said, “Outside the clinic, ketamine can cause tragedies, but in the right hands, it is a miracle.”
So, what is ketamine? It is labeled a dissociative anesthetic. Huh? It is mainly used in humans to start and maintain anesthesia, along with a tricky cocktail of IV and inhaled anesthetics. It induces a trance-like state and provides pain relief, sedation and temporary memory loss. It takes effect in about five minutes. Compared to many other anesthetics, heart function, breathing and airways reflexes remain functional and not depressed. When coming out of it, the side effects can be problematic, with confusion, agitation, and hallucinations among others.
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It was derived in 1962 from the known drug phencyclidine (fen-Sigh-kla-deen), another dissociative anesthetic we know better as PCP, a drug highly abused for hallucinatory qualities. PCP was created in 1926 as an anesthetic, but had too many dissociative results to be used. Ketamine was patented in Belgium in 1963 for veterinary use. It was tried in humans in 1964, and approved as an official human anesthetic in 1970. Because it doesn’t require support for heart or breathing suppression, it became commonly used for field surgeries in Vietnam. It is commonly used in veterinary surgeries.
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