Marcia Moore, author, astrologer, died after injecting Ketamine.
Up a tree. |
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Compared to the cultural revolutions of LSD and cannabis,
Ketamine's social impact has been miniscule.
It was too late for the 1960s and too anti-social. When you're
on your back in the K-hole, you can't talk, you don't care what Dylan's singing,
and Vietnam's just a concept, not a cause.
Accordingly, Ketamine's few cultural champions were hardly
mainstream icons. They included Marcia Moore, the heiress to the
Sheraton Hotel fortune and world famous writer on astrology and
'hypersentience.' Her 1978 book, Journeys
Into The Bright World recounted surreal K trips into abstract,
occult freak-scapes.
"If captains of
industry, leaders of nations could partake of this love medicine
the whole planet might be converted into the Garden Of Eden...At
no time did it seem possible that I or anyone else could become
a 'ketamine junkie'
"
Marcia Moore, Journeys Into The Bright World
But one cold, winter night in early 1979, Moore
disappeared from her home. Two years later, her skeleton was discovered
in a local forest. She had climbed into a tree, injected Ketamine,
fallen unconscious and frozen to death. She was 50-years-old.(1)
 top
club kids
In the late 1980s, Ketamine broke out of its West Coast ghetto
of esoteric academia, and para-psychology and up the nose of New York City's Club
Kids, a narcissistic, drug-heavy, gay scene. And for the first time it started
appearing in low-dose powder and pill form.
As a trippy dance club drug it soon crossed the Atlantic
and surfaced in the UK media as the menacing coda for a generation getting bored
with E.
Dubbed 'Special K', it was quickly demonised as a low rent
and dangerous 'psychedelic heroin.'
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Madonna's Ray Of Light - an ode to Ketamine? |
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madonna
This didn't stop Madonna name-checking Ketamine - her 1998
'Ray of Light' album reputedly contains tracks which describe the Ketamine experience.
"Madonna once commented that
she couldn't believe UK clubbers still preferred E to K. To sample
the narcotic zeitgeist according to Maddie and many others, we must
visit Manhattan's fabled club scene
"
Andy Crysell, Muzik
Closer to home, the Chemical Brothers' late 1990s best-selling album,
'Dig Your Own Hole', featured the track 'Lost in the K Hole'.
1. Ketamine: Dreams &
Realities p.54
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