IS YOUR KID ON K?

By JOHN CLOUD/TAMPA

It's 5:30 on a Sunday morning, but the 400-plus kids at the Fantasy Ranch dance club won't be making it to church. Instead, amid sweeping lights and the raw thumps of the aptly named song Insomnia, they sing the praises of the most recent drug to hit central Florida: Special K. "It's the bomb," gushes Tom, a sweaty 15-year-old with a struggling goatee. "It will make you like this," he says, rolling his eyes up as if staring at his brain. "It's dreamy. You see the lights, like, bend."

Tom's friend Sara quickly pulls a glass vial from her bra. After a glance around for security, she holds the black-capped vial under a pulsing light, revealing the powder she first came across in July. Now, she says, "I'm into it like every weekend." Sara is 16, and what she's into is an anesthetic sometimes administered to people but, more commonly, to cats and monkeys. Generically called ketamine, street K is most often diverted in liquid form from vets' offices or medical suppliers. Dealers dry the liquid (usually by cooking it) and grind the residue into powder. K causes hallucinations because it blocks chemical messengers in the brain that carry sensory input; the brain fills the resulting void with visions, dreams, memories, whatever. Sara says that once, after snorting several "bumps" of K, she thought other kids on the dance floor had been decapitated. "But I mean, I really knew they had heads. I was just, like, 'This is so weird.'"

And, apparently, enticing. After 25 years of underground recreational use by big-city clubgoers and New Age types (Timothy Leary was, of course, a fan), K has exploded in the past few months onto the suburban drug scene. In February, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration warned that use is increasing at teen "rave" parties, the marathon dances that have spawned a new youth subculture. Anti-drug czar Barry McCaffrey's office added K to its list of "emerging drugs" in 1995; the office's latest "pulse check" of the nation found K "all over." St. Louis, Mo., Tampa, Fla., and suburban New Jersey have seen a rash of animal-hospital break-ins by thieves hunting for ketamine.

The surest sign of K's popularity, however, is that it is seeping into pop culture: In an X-Files episode earlier this year, agent Fox Mulder had a rogue doctor dose him with ketamine in an attempt to recover memories. The Chemical Brothers, an electronic-music group, recorded a song called Lost in the K-Hole for their most recent album, which went gold last month. "K-hole" is jargon for a bad trip--too much K causes massive sensory deprivation, immobilizing and detaching a user from reality. This is not your father's groovy toke. London researcher Karl Jansen says the drug even reproduces the brain's chemical reaction to a "near-death experience."

All this attention has alarmed people like Lieutenant Bill Queen, who works narcotics in the Pinellas County sheriff's office, near Tampa Bay. He had never heard of K before December. Now, his undercover officers can buy it every week. "These kids don't know what they're getting into," says Queen. "But I can tell you, this is another drug that's going to be abused and cause harm." What really steams officer Queen is that he can't do much about it. Snorting K may be foolish, but it's not a felony. If someone without a medical or veterinary license is caught with ketamine in Florida, the maximum sentence is 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. Only a handful of state's attorneys have taken the time to prosecute K cases when the stakes are so tiny. For his part, Queen hasn't arrested anyone with K. "We could," he says, "but we're waiting," gathering evidence against dealers who sell it to his undercover cops. Next year, the legislature will consider a bill to "schedule" ketamine as a controlled substance, which would stiffen penalties.

A swift and simple solution, right? Well, no. Outlawing drugs like LSD (in the 1960s) and Ecstasy (in the 1980s) was easy since they have no government-acknowledged medical use and aren't made by licensed firms. But ketamine and other drugs that are actually medicines are different. Senator Joseph Biden discovered how delicate drug politics can be last year when he designed a bill to control ketamine and the so-called date-rape drug Rohypnol more closely. At the time, rapists' use of the latter to sedate victims had sparked an outcry, but the Rohypnol-controlling part of the legislation died under pharmaceutical-industry pressure. The industry, whose political action committees last year donated $2.1 million to Republican candidates and $714,000 to Democrats, doesn't want the added administrative burdens and federal oversight that come with scheduling a drug as a controlled substance. (Rohypnol was already scheduled, but the bill would have regulated it further.) Each unit of a scheduled drug must be scrupulously accounted for, and some doctors won't prescribe drugs stigmatized by that heavy designation. In the case of ketamine, neither Parke-Davis, which developed the drug, nor Fort Dodge Laboratories, which makes the veterinary brand Ketaset, opposes tighter restrictions. But the industry's supporters in Congress are loath to change industry-friendly precedent, which allows drugs to be scheduled only after lengthy administrative review. (States are more willing to flout industry wishes. So far, eight have added the drug to their books.)

Lost in these political battles is a basic question: is ketamine really dangerous? Maybe not. The British government decided not to closely restrict ketamine because it could not prove that K's effects were severe. Most drug-overdose deaths result from circulatory or respiratory failure, and ketamine doesn't usually depress these functions. Dr. Alex Stalcup, medical director of a California drug-treatment center, says the effects of K are "basically like being really, really drunk. It's really not a demon, not compared with the other stuff we're seeing with kids now," including smokable versions of heroin and speed.

Still, the possibility of K-high youths getting behind the wheel of a car is alarming, and ketamine was used in several rapes in the 1980s. Stalcup and others agree that ketamine can be addictive. "Some people get very habituated," says Ann Shulgin, a longtime drug researcher. "I've heard some uncomfortable stories--highly intelligent people who just don't seem aware that they're getting into a dependency."

A prominent experimenter with ketamine was John Lilly, a neuroscientist who pioneered communication with dolphins, and who was played by William Hurt in Altered States (1980). Lilly recalls that a doctor first gave him ketamine in the '70s for migraines. Lilly then began injecting himself with K and at one point was taking 50 milligrams an hour, 20 hours a day, for three weeks. He became convinced "that he was a visitor from the year 3001" and that he was talking to aliens. Today, Lilly is 82 and lives in Maui. He says he hasn't done K for "about a year" and believes it's not addictive. "Go out and try some," he urges. But he also says ketamine should be illegal. "It's dangerous if you don't know what you're doing," he says. "You could fall down."

Back at the Fantasy Ranch in Tampa, the kids have never heard of John Lilly or his friend Timothy Leary. "No, man, are they dealers?" asks one. When the deejay spins a song called A Little Bit of Ecstasy, cheers go up. "K is really fun," says Beth, 19, as she sashays away. "But I always know I'll be tired the next day."