The 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Many sexual abuse advocates, defense attorneys and survivors say this law is outdated and too narrowly drawn, and does not reflect the best research on consent and sexual assault.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, an associate 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.”
double quotation markPeople [on ketamine] can seem a bit like zombies, wide-eyed but conscious … That’s not conducive to consentProf 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 oneself.
“It’s advertised on the subway almost as an antidepressant wellness drug to help your social anxiety – not an extremely potent psychedelic that can cause you to experience a complete loss of your grip on reality and become catatonic,” says Prof Celia Morgan, the psychopharmacology chair at the University of Exeter.
“In countries where it’s been around a bit longer, like the UK, it has a more mixed reputation, including as a ‘horse tranquillizer’. But in the US, ketamine is less widely known for the full spectrum of its effects. A pleasant separation and numbing at low doses can turn incredibly frightening at high doses.”
At those doses, some people can enter a state in which they continue to participate in an activity despite having little understanding of what is happening around them. “People can seem a bit like zombies, wide-eyed but conscious,” says Morgan. “They can be responding to basic instructions but have absolutely no idea what is going on. Some people talk about it like staring into infinity.”
At still higher doses, that separation can become almost total. “People talk about being melted down into atoms,” Morgan says. “That’s not conducive to consent.”
The difference between small and large doses of ketamine can be deceivingly slim, with an intense trip possible with as little as a fifth of a gram. The drug is often taken by placing a small amount on the end of a house key, but that is an inexact measure and even one key can produce profound effects. Many drug consumers have also fallen victim to confusing their bags of ketamine with cocaine, which can be taken in larger doses – with disastrous effects.
Palamar says that when it comes to issues around sexual assault and consent, the role of ketamine is complex. A person might agree to one sexual act while relatively lightly intoxicated, he says, only for the ketamine to take fuller effect as the encounter continues. “Maybe you’ll be OK with one sexual act, but if you’re not able to say, ‘I don’t like that,’” he says, the situation becomes very different.
At sufficient doses, Palamar says, someone may not properly register being touched: “You might not even realise it’s another person’s hands.” Ketamine is also unusual among party drugs in that it does not generally enhance sexual feeling. In Palamar’s research, consumers said it was the least sexual drug. “It dulls it typically,” he says.
Ketamine’s strongest effects from a single dose last around an hour, but Doe alleged that she was being encouraged to take the drug several times over the course of the night. The district attorney has claimed that “each time Jane Doe asked to stop the sexual conduct, the sexual conduct stopped”. Yet, according to her account given to Cornell’s police officials in 2024, sexual activity subsequently resumed. According to transcripts from the university’s Title IX investigation, Doe stated, “I was given more key [sic] than I can remember,” she texted one of the men. She reportedly told one of them a week later: “You had penetrative sex with me. I had so much ketamine, my eyes were crossed, and you still had sex with me.”
In her 2024 account to Cornell police, she described becoming progressively more high over the course of the night, reaching what she called nearly a 10 out of 10.
“It was the most intoxicated I’ve ever been in my life,” Jane Doe told Cornell police investigators in 2024. “I felt like I was unable to make any decision.”
There are further complexities around the interaction of ketamine and alcohol, which Morgan says, makes “people feel much more disoriented and dizzy”.
double quotation markThe law appears to lack the nuance about being able to continue to consent … You have to be able to end the interactionJoseph Palamar
In the Cornell case, Doe reported being plied with “Jamaican liquor”, believed to be a high-proof rum, along with cannabis. The student reported feeling “fuzzy” and said her memory of events was “super cloudy”.
Ketamine has long been identified as a potential drug in drug-facilitated sexual assault, although it is much less commonly detected than GHB, rohypnol, benzodiazepines or alcohol. Unlike those drugs, however, people taking ketamine alone may retain substantial memories of what happened. “If you’re just on a moderate dose of ketamine you may remember a lot, or perhaps everything,” says Palamar. “If you’re drunk and you add ketamine to it, you can become sludgy. You can feel like a puddle of mush.”
Courts across the world are hearing more cases in which ketamine is being used to facilitate sexual assaults. Earlier this year, a 48-year-old man in England was jailed for 18 years for rape after giving ketamine to one of his victims and attacking her once she was under the effects. He “liked to see how different people, particularly females, reacted to ketamine”, the prosecutor said. In Colorado, in 2024, a 43-year-old man arrested on sexual assault charges pleaded guilty to second-degree assault of a child whom he plied with alcohol, ketamine and cocaine. On at least one occasion, he allegedly “provided the victim with ketamine to the extent that they did not know what was happening, and in this state … had sexual intercourse with them”.
Americans are also encountering ketamine like never before. Twenty years ago, ketamine was overwhelmingly a club drug. Now, about half of first-time consumers in Palamar’s current research report start in their homes. For others, especially those suffering from severe depression, the same dissociative properties that can make recreational ketamine disorienting have brought significant – even potentially lifesaving – therapeutic benefits. Experts say that a K-hole can be thoroughly worthwhile if the person taking the drug is prepared, supported and able to integrate the experience safely.
That leaves ketamine with an unusual dual identity in the US: increasingly accepted as a medicine, increasingly familiar as a recreational drug, yet still poorly understood, especially in sexual abuse contexts.
According to the current New York rape law involving cases where the victim is intoxicated, a person is only considered “mentally incapacitated” under state law after being spiked without their knowledge and thus unable to control their actions. “The law appears to lack the nuance about being able to continue to consent,” says Palamar. “You have to be able to end the interaction.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
