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Comment by jfk13 | Hacker News Reader

Someone I used to know was a ketamine user for a while -- when she wasn't busy with cocaine. (The impact was pretty drastic, so I'm guessing she was using rather more than might be recommended...) What I came to say, though, was that I'm quite sure she wasn't paying anything like that much for it.

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In my experience a gram of K in the US costs around $100

In the UK it is more like $20-$40

This is a bit like comparing street amphetamine powder with prescription adderall. People are willing to pay for a pure product measured precisely in laboratory, not cut with other dangerous chemicals delivered as a pill.

I’m not an expert but I’ve heard that K is so easy to make and cheap, it’s rarely cut.

From what I remember from the Hamilton's Pharmacopeia episode on Ketamine, this synthesis is actually quite complex and a high-yield synthesis (which is presumably being used currently by manufacturers) is not published in publicly available literature.

However, ketamine is widely used as an anesthetic, so I think the "cheap to make" refers to Ketamine redirected from the pharma market to illicit channels, in which case "making" ketamine is just drying the solution to crystalize the sole ingredient.

Street ketamine is almost always redirected pharmaceuticals. We used to buy cases of bottles unopened back in the 90s

This article says _was_ almost always: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-bc7d54e7-88f6-4026-...

In the specific case of ketamine, it’s easier and cheaper to acquire, and generally goes through far fewer intermediaries between the pharmacy and the street consumer. So the stuff you find on the street tends to be dramatically more pure than, say, cocaine.

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