5-27-2016 The United Nations has rebuffed, for now, pressure from China to enact what could amount to a global ban on ketamine, as many in the medical profession — veterinarians and physicians alike — work to maintain access to the drug.
The Chinese government for years has sought to bring ketamine under stricter global control due to recreational abuse in the country. https://news.vin.com/vinnews.aspx?articleId=40562
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7-10–2015 this old drug is getting a new life in night clubs. Recreational users say ketamine lifts them out of their bodies, into other worlds. Many feel like they can fly or float. They can escape reality. For decades it was only manufactured by pharmaceutical companies. Technically it was too complicated to be made by amateur chemists.
But in the past five years that has changed. Chinese drug gangs have cracked the code, figuring out how to manufacture large batches of cheap ketamine.
It's a “worrying development” says Martin Raithelhuber, a synthetic drug expert with the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime. “Other countries in the region report clandestine laboratories but not to the extent China has,” Martin says….
It's likely that Chinese gangs had help setting up their ketamine operations, probably from gangs in Mexico. Others might have helped too. Increasing numbers of transnational groups from South-east Asia, Colombia, Iran, Pakistan and West Africa are also co-operating with groups inside China, making the production and export of drugs like ketamine an international effort. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-bc7d54e7-88f6-4026-9faa-2a36d3359bb0
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10-9-2013 Ketamine is the most popular of all recreational drugs taken in South China, which is arguably the epicenter of global ketamine consumption and production. Here in the heart of China's longtime manufacturing base the drug is snorted and swallowed on a level unheard of in the West.
In 2008 the UN observed that ketamine—known in China simply as K or K粉 (K fen) or king—was "the most abused drug in Hong Kong [and] gaining popularity across southern China," but due to its legitimate applications, "the true extent of its use is unclear and probably underestimatd.” A report in Danwei in 2009 noted that K seizures in Hong Kong were rising at twice the rate of cocaine….
As with PCP, another so-called dissociative anesthetic from the 1960s, some users claim to be able to go straight down the K hole and be back relatively sober an hour later, just in time for work. …
"Compared to methamphetamine and heroin, K is rather cheap," explains Officer Wang, a senior member of the Public Security Bureau in Dongguan, the gigantic manufacturing city in Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong. (Wang is a pseudonym, as police officers are not authorized to speak to the media.) "The general public is unaware of the dangers of K," he says. "Many believe this drug isn't addictive, and have the misunderstanding that it's not harmful to your health." But, he added, "[K] is capable of… not only harming our social moral fabric but even destroying society altogether.”…
yet drugs remain readily available in China, if you know where to look. A cursory web search for drugs on the Chinese Internet yields promises of meth "delivered to your door within hours!" Some pharmaceutical factories offer "24-hour delivery service… just make one phone call, we'll deliver to your hands in one to five hours.” A Chinese-language web query for "'k fen' + 'buy'" returns over thirteen million results. Most offer visible contact details (usually a QQ number, similar to Skype, or sometimes a cellphone), although it's not certain how many are fully operational.
Popular social-networking apps like Tencent's WeChat, known in Chinese as Weixin, a free messaging service that has well over 300 million users in China, have become a popular new channel for trafficking too. On WeChat "rice" is the nickname for K (meth is "pork") and dealers usually use homophones of "drug selling" as their usernames, or pills as avatars, to chat up potential clients….
As legal ketamine continues to slip into the black market, clandestine homemade labs are proliferatating. Self-taught ketamine chemists conceal their labs in mountains and forests, reported the Guangzhou-based Southern Daily in 2010. "The new generation of drugs are easy to make," one source told the paper, "requiring only ingredients available at every drugstore and basic chemistry knowledge." In March, Chinese media reported that in Hubei, police seized nearly 300 kilograms of ketamine and detained 12 suspects at an illegal lab, a deserted poultry farm that claimed to be "processing medicine." It's a poignant euphamism: recreational users don't refer to it as xi du—literally "inhaling poison"—but haiyao, which means "high" medicine….
"There's not a physical addiction, but [users] are very much psychologically addicted," Patrick Wu of the Shek Kwu Chau rehabilitation center in Hong Kong told the AFP in a story that dubbed it "powerful and addictive." Their K treatment program lasts "at least six months, compared to just two months for heroin.”…
China's public security service doesn't provide much verifiable information about the efforts to fight K. But in 2012, according to public statistics, the police confiscated 4.7 tons of K, along with 7.3 tons of heroin, 16.2 tons of methamphetamine, and more than 5,800 tons of chemical agents used to make drugs.
This year's biggest reported mainland ketamine bust involved over a thousand kilos. According to the Straits Herald, a Fujian paper, a pair of Taiwanese men were reported to have purchased 50,000 RMB, about $8,100, worth of wooden Buddha statues from a Fuzhou tradesman, "Mr Lin." After Lin reported the men's apparent indifference toward his craftsmanship to police, they traced the purchase and found 700 bags of K secreted in 50 sculptures, all en route from Guangdong to Taiwan, via Xiamen and Fuzhou.
Among "new drugs" however ketamine is not Dr. Gong's—or China's—biggest concern. Like much of the world, he is facing down the rising threat of meth addiction….By contrast, K is a physically non-addictive hallucinogenic anesthetic. It serves no economic purpose to users. It transcends socio-economic boundaries. In an increasingly wealthier China, K is cool….
K's a made-in-China high and even Dean Zhong of the Chinese Public Security Bureau says it has a street value of around 40-60RMB per gram—about $10 in coastal areas, about a fifth of what Golden suggests. Further inland, around Guanxi, it might go for 160-180RMB.
A dealer contacted over WeChat in Beijing claims to sell meth and K, both the domestic variety and imported from India. Both would cost us around 100 RMB per gram in the capital. Purity? 90 percent, he assured. Could he send 10 grams? No problem….
In a rare and dramatic public example of drug enforcement in May a platoon of 1,000 police officers, some toting submachine guns, made an early-morning raid on an "extravagant" four-story, 60-KTV room hotel in Dongguan, capital of Guangdong, arresting around 2,000 clients for possession of ketamine and other drugs. So large was the haul that the cops were forced to mobilize eight public buses just to transport them into detention.
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In May 2015, for example, 46 kilograms of fentanyl and 26 kilograms of acetyl fentanyl destined for Mexico were seized by Chinese customs officials. Chinese officials later learned that the illicit cargo had gone through five different freight forwarding companies before arriving at customs. July 2016. https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/docs/Counterfeit%2520Prescription%2520Pills.pdf
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