The group is warned that the drug will hit quickly. “Dr. John is going to give you a shot of ketamine, and you’re going to feel it right away,” says Kaia Roman, the session facilitator. For about 45 minutes “you will completely surrender to the experience,” she tells them. “You might feel like you’re floating out of your body, or are not even aware of where you are or who you are.” She tells everyone not to be nervous, because “that’s actually where the beauty and the release can come from.”
It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in Santa Cruz, California, and the seven women and one man in the group lie down on fluffy blankets and pillows and slip on eye masks. Then they each lift a sleeve so that John Grady, an osteopathic doctor, can inject their shoulder with 100 or so milligrams of ketamine.
The event has echoes of Ken Kesey’s acid tests, the first of which took place in 1965 in a house not far away. But these aren’t thrill-seeking psychonauts. The participants are largely midcareer professionals—a nonprofit director, a chemist, an executive coach, a midwife—some engaging in their first psychedelic experience. On their minds are questions of work-life balance and how to show up best for themselves and their families. One possible answer? A quick detour into the ketaverse.
Ketamine, which the US Drug Enforcement Administration describes as a “dissociative anesthetic hallucinogen,” distorts users’ senses and makes them feel detached from their bodies. It’s had many lives as a medical and recreational drug: in the 1960s, injected as an anesthetic; in the 1990s, snorted as a party drug; and, for the past decade, prescribed for anxiety and depression.
It’s also gaining popularity as a way to maximize professional performance, in a trend similar to Silicon Valley’s embrace several years ago of microdosing LSD. In professional circles where optimization is sought at every opportunity, it makes sense for people to regard ketamine as a new method of approaching the project of themselves. “It’s great when people have intentions around thriving and clarity and being more creative and productive in their life and work,” says Reid Robison, chief clinical officer of ketamine company Numinus Wellness Inc., who leads group ketamine sessions. “We hope to take them out of the healing-only realms and into healing and growth and ways of improving their lives.” For legal reasons, Robison says he ensures that participants in his sessions have an appropriate mental health diagnosis.
As a self-improvement tool, ketamine has some advantages over other psychedelics such as ayahuasca, which is illegal in most countries and can provoke the kind of bodily expulsions most people try to avoid at work events. “From a professional perspective, it’s much more palatable,” says Niko Everett, an executive coach in San Francisco.
Experts say there are risks both of overdoses and dependence with repeated use of ketamine. Although the drug has been prescribed off-label for years to manage depression, researchers are still trying to understand how it works for such uses. It’s not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to address mental health, but in 2019 the agency did approve a nasal spray of a ketamine derivative in certain therapeutic situations. The growing acceptance of ketamine in medical settings has also corresponded with increased recreational use, highlighting the possibility that therapeutic advances could lead to abuses elsewhere.
Ketamine’s trajectory may indicate what’s ahead for other drugs such as psilocybin and MDMA if they’re more widely legalized. Some employers are paying for their employees to access ketamine treatment, sometimes in group settings intended to hash out office frictions. And some executive coaches are getting more comfortable suggesting it to clients.
Roman, the Santa Cruz facilitator, and her business partner Mike “Zappy” Zapolin are at the forefront of the trend. In 2020, their business trademarked the portmanteau “ketatation,” derived from “ketamine meditation,” that some providers have given to group sessions. Since the beginning of the pandemic, they’ve overseen ketatations in Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Silicon Valley and Utah. Zapolin, who calls himself “the psychedelic concierge to the stars,” has also given ketamine to former NBA star Lamar Odom, Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort and executive teams from Silicon Valley. “We put them on yoga mats in the room, we have a prescription from a doctor, and we have a 45-minute experience together,” followed by a guided discussion, he says. “There’s incredible ESP [extrasensory perception] that happens within the group.”
Chase Hudson, the co-founder of HempLucid, a CBD company in Provo, Utah, has gathered his five-person leadership team for ketamine sessions overseen by Robison and other doctors. In a typical sitting, the group decides on a focus, such as “open, honest communication,” takes a conversation-friendly dose and discusses work. In a recent session, he realized that he, his marketing director and his sales director weren’t able to communicate clearly because their egos were getting in the way. “I had this ego dissolution like, ‘Oh, man. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were looking for this, this and this,’” he says. He describes the sensation this way: “You’re speaking from the heart and not the mind.”
Hudson’s goal is to “bridge the gap between the psychedelic world and the corporate space.” To that end, he includes access to ketamine treatments for mental health among the benefits he provides to his 15 employees. He’s also explored doing group ketamine sessions with his employees. At times, it’s gotten weird—“We learned quickly it’s too intimate, you’re not in control of your body, you say things,” he says. Now they do sessions separately and debrief together afterward: “That has made our company culture even stronger.”
Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps began offering ketamine-assisted therapy employee benefits to its workers last year. It used a psychedelic therapy insurance benefit plan administrator called Enthea, which raised $2 million from venture capitalists anticipating that employer-based psychedelic therapy is a growth market.
For busy professionals, a major benefit of ketamine is the way it can open up new pathways of thinking, says Everett, the executive coach. “It’s so hard for people to create new habits,” she says. Her clients are mainly high-level female executives in Silicon Valley, and they cannot “unplug from the overwhelm.” She’ll help clients hire assistants and rework their calendars, but they still work 70 hours a week. Even though the ketamine trip itself can provide insight, Everett is more interested in changing habits during the days afterward, when ketamine advocates say the brain is more suggestible than usual.
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After the syringes are put away at the house in Santa Cruz, everyone lies quietly with their eyes covered while Roman plays soothing music; chords fade gradually into the next, with tinkling chimes. Occasionally someone breathes sharply or murmurs to themselves. One woman whispers, “It’s OK to collapse.” After about an hour, Roman switches to more energetic music and gently rouses them by telling them to wiggle their fingers and toes.
As they munch on clementines and baby carrots, they share some of their visions. “I had a sense of being inside myself on a cellular level,” one says. Another says it felt as if an atom was inside their brain, whizzing through their body. Several compare the sensation to that of Avatar: The Way of Water, in which characters zoom in three dimensions through aquatic forests. One woman saw visions focused on how complex entities are made of many small parts—a school of fish or a flock of birds—“feeling like a small part of a whole, but not really understanding what that whole is.”
One of the women, Lan, resurfaced after her ketamine session and immediately began crying. Lan, who asked to be identified by her middle name to avoid professional repercussions, is a 50-year-old Bay Area nonprofit director and a single mother struggling to balance her job with her well-being. When she heard about ketamine, she brought the idea of a single $300 session with Roman and Dr. Grady to her therapist and her executive coach, who both signed off on it. (Her coach, who knows Roman, also participated in the Santa Cruz gathering.)
Lan’s intentions were to heal childhood trauma and to access self-love, clarity and creativity. Once the needle left her arm, she felt she was plunged into an internal world, “very womblike,” she says. While swimming in her thoughts, she met herself as a child. There, she began to come to terms with how she blamed herself for unhappy aspects of her childhood; it was something she’d known but hadn’t felt deeply. “I felt like, ‘Wow, that was really frickin’ efficient,’” she says. “For the price of two therapy sessions, I went around the world three times.”
A week or two after the ketamine gathering, Lan says she could access a different way of thinking during quotidian moments of work stress. When an email grated on her, she was able to admit to herself that something wasn’t working for her. When a co-worker made an error, she didn’t get caught up in the emotions of the moment, she says, and was able to see how to move forward. She gave her kids firm feedback about their house chores, driven by the clarity she now felt about what she needed to do to care for her own needs as well as theirs. “It’s given me a new perspective on my career and what I want to accomplish at this organization,” she says. Ketamine wasn’t the perfect fix, but given her time and financial constraints, it works for now, she says. “I cannot afford to take a month off to go chant with monks.”
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