ETHICISTS QUESTION HALLUCINOGENS EXPERIMENTS ON THE HEALTHY

Medicine: Some subjects were not fully informed of the effects of research
involving ketamine,records show.

Psychiatric researchers over the past several years have given about 100
healthy individuals across the nation a powerful hallucinogen, known to drug
abusers as Special K, to study psychosis, often without fully disclosing the
nature of the drug or the experiments.

The studies using ketamine have involved both mentally ill and healthy
subjects, placing them both at potential risk of psychotic episodes,
according to documents reviewed by the Globe.

Using ketamine on healthy volunteers especially troubles some medical
ethicists, because there is no possibility that healthy people as a class
will achieve any benefit to offset the risk of harm. The mentally ill, at
least in theory, would be aided by any knowledge gained about the biology of
psychosis.

Most of the ketamine experiments have been conducted at the National
Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., or at NIMH-funded facilities
such as the medical schools of Yale and New York universities.

A Globe review of their research and some of the consent forms that
participants are asked to sign indicates that subjects are often not being
told that the drug is being given specifically to induce symptoms such as
hallucinations or memory loss, or that it is abused as a psychedelic drug.

On the streets and on drug-subculture Internet sites, ketamine is known for
being able to create near-death experiences, feelings of floating, and other
hallucinations. It has recently been used as a date-rape drug and at
allnight parties known as raves, prompting several states to make illegal
possession a felony.

Some critics see these experiments as an echo of 1950s and 1960s research in
which psychiatrists gave people LSD without fully informing them of the risk
"It's just like shades of LSD research as far as I'm concerned," said Carl
Tishler, an Ohio State University psychologist who has written on the ethics
of ketamine experiments.

LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, was made illegal across the nation in
the 1960s.

Ketamine is primarily used as an animal tranquilizer, particularly for cats
and nonhuman primates. It had once been commonly used as a human anesthetic,
until its hallucinogenic properties were discovered. Ketamine, also known on
the streets as KitKat or, simply, K, is a chemical cousin of PCP, or "angel
dust."

In a recent series on psychiatric, the Globe documented the harm done by the
use of ketamine and other "challenge" agents to induce psychotic symptoms in
people with schizophrenia, as well as from other research approaches. An
additional review has revealed studies involving ketamine in more than 100
healthy people since 1994 - and the growing illicit use of the drug.

"If this is what they are doing to normal (people), God help us with the
cognitively impaired," said Adil Shamoo, a university of Maryland
bioethicist and editor of the journal Accountability in Research.

As a result of the Globe's review, Shamoo said, the New York-based advocacy
group he co-founded, Citizens for Responsible Care in Psychiatry and
Research, will expand its call for a moratorium on challenge studies, to
include those involving healthy people.

While the possibility of experiencing long-term harm from a drug-induced
psychosis is less likely among healthy people, there is still the risk that
some normal subjects will have flashbacks months afterward, even if they
apparently have no history of substance abuse or mental illness that would
make them vulnerable, according to the Globe's review of LSD and ketamine
research, and ethicists familiar with the research.