In the days and weeks leading up to Matthew Perry’s death , the actor used large amounts of ketamine — the drug responsible for his death — supplied by a web of doctors, his personal assistant, an acquaintance and a drug dealer, federal prosecutors said Thursday . Here’s what to know about ketamine. What is ketamine? Ketamine is a hallucinogen that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration as an anesthetic for surgery decades ago, but it’s also used illegally as a party drug.
Over the last few years, growing research has found that ketamine also works for treatment-resistant depression in some people, leading to a rise in what’s known as off-label use, the legal practice of doctors prescribing an approved drug for a condition that it wasn’t approved for. How is ketamine used for depression? Dr. Brandon Hamm, a psychiatrist who runs the ketamine infusion clinic at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, said that the drug’s value lies, in part, in how fast it works.
“It’s an important drug because it offers something quick and effective for something that’s a major source of disability for folks,” Hamm said. “Treatment-resistant depression causes great suffering.” A slightly different version of ketamine, called esketamine or Spravato, was approved by the FDA in 2019 for treatment-resistant depression.
Esketamine is given as a nasal spray and must be administered in a doctor’s office; it’s approved only for people for whom other depression trea.