Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod. A show about the past, rediscovered.

There's a promising new prescription drug that was recently approved to treat depression.

Spravato will be available at certified treatment centers.

The new drug from Johnson and Johnson acts on different brain chemicals than the decades-old

antidepressants like Prozac.

But Spravato is being treated with caution, and it can only be administered in a doctor's

office under medical supervision.

That's because the new treatment is closely related to another drug, one that's been

around since 1962 and often

used for a very different purpose.

For getting really high and dancing all night.

Bravado is actually a form of ketamine, or as it's been known for decades by trip seekers in the counterculture

club scene, special K. Ketamine was first synthesized as a drug in the early 1960s, and its

intended use was pain relief. This is some really powerful stuff,

so potent that it knocks out horses for surgery.

During the Vietnam War,

medics used ketamine to treat wounded U.S. soldiers,

though obviously with smaller doses than the horses.

One side effect soldiers experienced was an otherworldly mind-body attachment

that made users feel like they were floating away with their organs not fully attached.

When word of this reached home, the trippy crowd really wanted to get their hands on the stuff.

The federal government tried to get it off the streets, but some far-out researchers continued

...