Andrea Dumlop

True Story Media.

If you're an elder millennial like me, you may remember a time when ketamine was mostly known by its street name, Special K. Otherwise known as a substance you are not even tempted by after that one time that your friend's cousin got stuck in a K-hole and hallucinated in a hall closet for an entire night and freaked everyone out.

But ketamine has gotten a bit of a makeover in recent years after the FDA's 2019 green light for intranasal ketamine has helped fuel thousands of ketamine clinics across the United States.

And a large number of clinical studies are currently exploring the drug for treatment-resistant depression and other conditions.

But despite some genuinely promising research, ketamine has been trending again more recently for less positive reasons, as it was responsible for the death of beloved actor Matthew Perry in October of 2023, and is also responsible for some of whatever the hell is going on with Elon Musk.

Ketamine is also a big part of this story.

One of my enduring questions about the public reception of the Kowalski story is how on earth they managed to tell this story in such a way that it seemed fine and normal to give a nine-year-old girl so much ketamine.

On September 23rd, 2015, after being told by doctors from three separate hospitals, including a pain specialist with expertise in CRPS, that Maya Kowalski did not have CRPS, but was suffering from a conversion disorder, Beata Kowalski took Maya to see Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick.

Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick is an anesthesiologist and self-described expert in CRPS.

As we learned at trial, his credentials are a little questionable.

Here he is being cross-examined by attorney Howard Hunter.

No.

Correct.

And Dr. Gerpatrick readily acknowledged his outlier status, again from his cross-examination.

Correct.

But for Beata Kowalski, Dr. Kirkpatrick was a godsend.

The day after their first visit on September 23rd, Beata emailed Dr. Kirkpatrick to thank him for giving us supporting evidence and the diagnosis.

Supporting evidence because, of course, Beata had already reported to a doctor that Maya had CRPS, as Howard Hunter mentioned in court.

Dr. Kirkpatrick admitted that he didn't know where that diagnosis had come from.

In this same email, Beata also discusses scheduling Maya for her first ketamine infusion and asks about laser and stem cell treatments for her daughter.