learning that it was accidentally found in 1926 and then some guy in 1963 realized hey we could sell this as an anesthetic. (and it does actually work fairly well, as an nmda* receptor antagonist like esketamine, dxm and n2o) but then literally 2 years later it was banned because of surging street use lol

so then of course by then they had been looking into developing derivatives of it, and ended up discovering a safer and less toxic anesthetic that was then tested on prisoners... ketamine

absurd

* not to be confused with mdma (another drug), mda (another other drug), ndma (a carcinogen**) or ndea (another carcinogen**)

** these have both been found as contaminants in hundreds of medications, which is just, really really cool. this includes ranitidine (zantac®), with 3 million us prescriptions/y, valsartan (diovan®) with 5 million/y, losartan (cozaar®) with 7 million/y, metformin(!!!!!!!!) with 92 million/y, etc