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Lobbying by Canadian researchers and others to safeguard an anesthetic crucial to poorer countries appears to have paid off, as China withdrew Friday its motion calling for ketamine to be added to the list of internationally controlled narcotics.

China had proposed “scheduling” the drug, known on the street as Special K, because it has emerged as a highly popular party drug in parts of east Asia. But because of its low cost and ease of use, it is also the most widely administered anesthetic in the developing world, and critics feared the move could make it all but unavailable to those places.

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On Friday, the Chinese delegation to the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs deferred its resolution for a year so it can be studied more, said Jason Nickerson, the Ottawa-based researcher who has helped direct the worldwide fight in defence of ketamine.

“What this means is that the Chinese were sufficiently embarrassed knowing that they did not have the votes required to be successful that they backed down,” he said by email Friday from the Commission’s annual meeting in Vienna. “But the issue is still alive and we’ll have to wait to see what happens in the next few weeks … For now, ketamine remains unscheduled and accessible to the billions of people who depend on it for access to life saving surgery.”