A lawsuit filed by a former Cornell University student, identified as Jane Doe, alleges she was gang raped by fraternity members after nasally ingesting ketamine at a party, bringing renewed scrutiny to the drug's effects and the legal framework around sexual assault.
Ketamine, a dissociative anaesthetic, is increasingly consumed in the US both as an illegal party drug and as a legal mental health treatment. In the civil lawsuit filed in New York supreme court against several defendants including Cornell, the then-20-year-old sophomore claims she had never taken ketamine before and that a Chi Phi fraternity brother “commanded” her to snort a line of the drug from his penis.
Legal challenges around voluntary intoxication
In a 2024 account to police, Jane Doe described feeling her eyes looking in different directions and becoming “completely numb to the whole situation”. She said, “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. 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 Many sexual abuse advocates, defense attorneys and survivors say this law is outdated and does not reflect the best research on consent and sexual assault. On Friday, New York's governor, Kathy Hochul, said it should be changed.
Ketamine's unique effects on the body and mind
Joseph Palamar, a professor in the population health department at NYU Grossman school of medicine, said, “When someone does ketamine for the first time, that's sometimes a scary situation by itself because they don't know what's happening. Even if you're an experienced drug user, it can blow people away. You might have something you want to say but the words just don't come out.” At high doses, ketamine can plunge inexperienced consumers into an unwanted and destabilizing “K-hole”, bringing about profound disconnection from reality and even oneself.
Prof Celia Morgan, the psychopharmacology chair at the University of Exeter, said, “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. 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 where they continue to participate in an activity despite little understanding of what is happening. Morgan said, “People can seem a bit like zombies, wide-eyed but conscious. 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, with people talking about being “melted down into atoms”. Morgan added, “That's not conducive to consent.”
Complexities in consent and drug interactions
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 confused 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, only for the ketamine to take fuller effect as the encounter continues. He said, “Maybe you'll be OK with one sexual act, but if you're not able to say, 'I don't like that,'” 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, with Palamar's research showing 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 she was encouraged to take the drug several times over the course of the night. The district attorney claimed that “each time Jane Doe asked to stop the sexual conduct, the sexual conduct stopped”, yet according to her 2024 account to Cornell's police officials, sexual activity subsequently resumed. In transcripts from the university's Title IX investigation, Doe stated, “I was given more key [sic] than I can remember,” and reportedly told one of the men 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, Doe described becoming progressively more high over the course of the night, reaching what she called nearly a 10 out of 10. She told investigators, “It was the most intoxicated I've ever been in my life. I felt like I was unable to make any decision.”
Further complexities arise from the interaction of ketamine and alcohol, which Morgan says makes “people feel much more disoriented and dizzy”. In the Cornell case, Doe reported being plied with “Jamaican liquor”, believed to be a high-proof rum, along with cannabis, 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. Palamar said, “If you're just on a moderate dose of ketamine you may remember a lot, or perhaps everything. 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 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. The prosecutor said he “liked to see how different people, particularly females, reacted to ketamine”. 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, allegedly providing the victim with ketamine to the extent that they did not know what was happening and then having 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 starting 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.
This 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 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. Palamar said, “The law appears to lack the nuance about being able to continue to consent. You have to be able to end the interaction.”
