‘Even if you’re an experienced drug user, [ketamine] can blow people away,” says associate professor Joseph Palamar. ‘You might have something you want to say but the words just don’t come out.’ Photograph: pcess609/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘Even if you’re an experienced drug user, [ketamine] can blow people away,” says associate professor Joseph Palamar. ‘You might have something you want to say but the words just don’t come out.’ Photograph: pcess609/Getty Images Drugs Cornell case raises questions about rise of ketamine in sexual assaults: ‘You might not realize you’re being touched’ After a Jane Doe claimed she was encouraged to take ketamine in an alleged gang rape, advocates are urging for tighter laws around the dissociative
Prefer the Guardian on Google T he effects of the drug ketamine have come into sharp focus after a former Cornell University student alleged in a lawsuit that several fraternity members gang raped her at a frat house party after she nasally ingested the drug.
Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic consumed increasingly in the US as both an illegal party drug and legal mental health treatment .
Cornell’s Jane Doe, then a 20-year-old sophomore, said she had never taken ketamine before. According to the civil lawsuit filed in New York supreme court against several defendants including Cornell, the victim alleges that one of the Chi Phi fraternity brothers “commanded” her to snort a line of ketamine from his penis.
Recounting the incident in 2024, she told police investigators that she felt that her eyes were looking in different directions. “I was starting to become completely numb to the whole situation,” she said in her statement . “I will never know who all touched me.”
The reopened investigation has increased scrutiny on New York’s voluntary intoxication laws, which make it harder to secure convictions for assault survivors if they were under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Under current New York penal law, people who are voluntarily intoxicated cannot claim they were incapacitated during an assault unless they can show they were physically helpless. In practice, legal experts say, this means a defence of claiming a victim was too drunk to verbally withdraw consent is rarely successful in New York courts.
Many sexual abuse advocates, defense attorneys and survivors say this law is outdated and too narrowly drawn , and does not reflect the best research on consent and sexual assault. On Friday, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, said it should be changed .
But even in its current form, the law may not allow for the impacts of ketamine – a drug that has only become more commonplace in the US in the past decade and acts differently from alcohol and date rape drugs like GHB – on the body and mind.
“When someone does ketamine for the first time, that’s sometimes a scary situation by itself because they don’t know what’s happening,” says Joseph Palamar, a professor in the population health department at NYU Grossman school of medicine. “Even if you’re an experienced drug user, it can blow people away,” Palamar says. “You might have something you want to say but the words just don’t come out.”
People [on ketamine] can seem a bit like zombies, wide-eyed but conscious ... That’s not conducive to consent Prof Celia Morgan At high enough doses, ketamine can plunge inexperienced consumers into an unwanted and destabilizing “K-hole”, bringing about profound disconnection from reality – and even…