According to CNN, the kids in Hong Kong are all taking ketamine ("the horse tranquilizer") nowadays - although we're not given much in the way of statistics.
Ketamine is a fascinating molecule. On the street, it's a drug, naturally. High doses produce a state of dissociative unconciousness affectionately called the "K-hole", while lower doses have a sedative and mild hallucinogenic effect which goes well with dancing, allegedly. It's also used medically as an anaesthetic.
In psychiatry, ketamine is three things: a drug of abuse, an antidepressant, and a way to mimic schizophrenia. Or rather, there are people who think of ketamine as each of these things. It seems somewhat unlikely that it could be all three at once. You don't treat depression by causing schizophrenia, and people don't deliberately give themselves psychosis, even temporarily.
Yet a journal could publish a paper about using ketamine as a model of schizophrenia, and ...
