“It's the most fun you can have for twenty quid”: Motivations, Consequences and Meanings of British Ketamine Use

Abstract

Whilst ketamine use in clubbing contexts has recently been the focus of British media attention, little quantitative or qualitative data is available on its use amongst those young people participating in Britain's contemporary post-rave electronic dance music (EDM) ‘scenes’ as clubbers. Drawing on data from in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 current regular ketamine users, this article explores user accounts of their motivations for taking ketamine within EDM clubbing contexts, the consequences (both positive and negative) of use and the broader meanings of use. Each issue is considered in relation to two key emergent themes: ‘intensity’ and ‘sociability’ in the drug experience. Participants attempted to optimise the possibility of pleasurable intoxication. This primarily involved participants controlling the quantity, quality and frequency of dose, along with various aspects of the setting of their use, in the hope of producing their individual favoured level of intensity and level of sociability during the ketamine experience. Relatedly, participants drew on discourses of uncontrolled hedonism, compulsion, ‘inappropriate to occasion’ and ‘inappropriate for purpose’ usage to make sense of negative consequences and to firmly position themselves as ‘sensible’ ‘recreational’ users in light of conflicting, largely negative meanings of ketamine produced by other (non-ketamine using) clubbers, the media and ‘official’ responses to use. The article concludes by considering how pleasure is understood and acquired by participants through a pleasure nexus of intersecting axes of intensity and sociability, with users attempting to manage their own intoxication in accordance with individual preferences and previous experiences.

• Ketamine
• intoxication
• intensity
• sociability
• pleasure
• pleasure nexus

Notes

Notes

1. With thanks to Lancaster University for funding for this study.

2. The term ‘club drug’ is used here in preference to ‘dance drug’ to denote that the clubbing experience involves more than simply dancing at a club and relatedly, therefore, that the motivation to take psychoactive drugs during the course of a clubbing night out is not exclusively to enhance the activity of dancing.

3. Both surveys are located at www.clubbingresearch.com

4. All our interviewees also indicated that they had used ketamine within the past 3 months.

5. All interviewee names have been changed.

6. After-hours clubs or breakfast clubs typically open at 3–4 am and continue until about 10 am. Ketamine use was far more visible and open at such after-hours clubs visited by the authors compared with dance clubs.

7. The term ‘semi-social’ was used by Sam, one of our ketamine interviewees.

8. See also Measham (2002) on the appeal of temporal distortions to extend the weekend clubbing experience.

9. Although more recent media coverage of ketamine has included more positively worded reports of the drug's potential in helping alleviate depression (see BBC 2007), an apt example of the possibility of dichotomous representations of the same drug according to use contexts.

10. “Ket-ed” is a term frequently used by clubbers to describe relatively intense intoxication from ketamine, but intoxication which still enables social interaction with other ketamine-using peers.