The lives of two “ketamine queens” born 55 years apart map the shifting history of drug use in the West over more than half a century. Marcia Moore (b. 1928) and Jasveen Sangha (b. 1983) sought fame and fortune through ketamine, a long-time human and veterinary anesthetic, now prescribed for managing anxiety in the United States, with dissociative properties and the capacity to create psychedelic hallucinations. Their stories are two parts of a single arc: particular in their details, yet universal in their wider message.
Moore’s story would end with her sudden disappearance in January 1979, and the appearance of her jawless skull two years later, in March 1981. Sangha’s freedom would end with her arrest and indictment on charges relating to the ketamine-induced death of “Friends” sitcom star Matthew Perry in his jacuzzi in October 2023. While the circumstances surrounding Moore’s death remain a mystery, there is little doubt that it was linked to ketamine use. In Sangha’s case, she has already pleaded guilty to selling Perry the lethal dose of “Special K” that killed him. Two deaths. Two “queens.” Their lives, as a user and a supplier, ruined by this unassuming killer.
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Moore was establishing herself as a writer and charismatic public speaker on esoteric subjects such as yoga, astrology, lost worlds, extraterrestrials and reincarnation, ketamine was perceived as an anesthetic, sedative and pain reliever in the surgical and aftercare treatment of both people and animals. Veterinarians used it, as did the National Health Service in Britain and hospitals in the U.S. It would ultimately become infamous as a horse tranquilizer turned date rape drug, among other things. But in the beginning, its properties were perceived as medical and purely positive — unlike narcotics or hallucinogens such as LSD, which wooed the baby boomer generation, or the party pills and cocaine that swept Generation X and the millennials off their feet. Ketamine was a late starter in the drug race. It was people like Moore who, in the 1970s, saw ketamine’s psychedelic potential and helped make that aspect of the drug seem appealing.