“Ketamine is helpful for getting one out of the negative frame of mind,” Elon Musk told an interviewer last year. The unelected man currently gutting US federal programs isn’t the only one who thinks so. Ketamine, approved decades ago as a surgical anesthetic and long used as a party drug, is the off-label mental-health treatment of the moment. It induces a “trancelike” state of “sensory isolation,” researchers say, and may temporarily boost the brain’s neuroplasticity—which, in theory, makes mental ruts easier to escape. At the same time, ketamine abuse can be deadly, and the drug remains illegal to use without a prescription. (Musk says he has one from “an
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