It’s used as a party drug, a horse tranquilizer and an anaesthetic.

But could ketamine become Australia’s newest weapon against depression?

According to lead researcher at the University of New South Wales, Professor Colleen Loo, ketamine could soon become a “revolutionary” treatment for depression in Australia.

Professor Loo will begin the world’s largest university-based trial of its kind in NSW this week. Two-hundred patients across Australia and New Zealand who haven’t responded to existing treatments for depression will be injected with ketamine twice a week, for four weeks.

Researches will then compare the results to patients given a placebo.

While there’s already been promising evidence of ketamine’s short term effectiveness in treating depression, UNSW researchers hope they’ll be able to discover more about the drug’s long-term benefits.

“It’s an amazing drug, the short term effects that I’ve seen are remarkable,” Professor Colleen Loo told Hack.

“What we need to do now is in research develop that so that we get long term benefits. And that’s what we and other people around the world are working on. It has the potential to be a revolutionary treatment for depression.”

Isn’t ketamine illegal?

Not exactly. In Australia, ketamine can actually be legally prescribed by doctors. Other uses - possessing, manufacturing, selling or driving under the influence of ketamine is illegal.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration has guidelines on what ketamine should be used for; depression isn’t one of them.

But that hasn’t stopped some doctors from prescribing ketamine to their patients as a treatment for depression, Professor Loo says.

Again, it’s not illegal, and Professor Loo doesn’t say it’s necessarily “unethical” for doctors to do so. But she says it’s “incautious” to prescribe ketamine for depression before research shows how the drug should be used in that context.

There’s currently commercial clinics in Australia who administer ketamine to patients as a treatment for depression, Professor Loo says, but the jury is still out on how the drug should be used responsibly in treatment.

Last year, the ABC revealed commercial clinics in Sydney and Melbourne, known as the Aura Medical Corporation, were giving patients vials of ketamine to inject at home to treat depression.

The clinics were then forced to close down due to bad publicity, while the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency conducted an investigation into the chain.

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Whatsapp Around 25 patients a week were given ketamine syringes to take home from the Melbourne Aura Medical clinic, May 29, 2015.

Some patients at the Aura clinic had praised their use of ketamine as a “miracle cure” for depression.

Have you used ketamine to treat depression? We want to hear from you. Email hack@abc.net.au, all conversations confidential.

“I’ve heard from patients and clinicians saying this is fantastic, let’s start giving people a series of treatments. Then they get stuck in a really bad spot.

“Then they get to the point where they start increasing the dose, increasing the frequency, and the person is gradually declining.

“Then there’s the anxiety that if you stop the treatments [the patient] will crash and get even worse than where they started. That’s kind of the nightmare situation.

“We need to work out if we’re going to use it repeatedly and what is a responsible and useful treatment protocol, rather than just giving people many treatments.”

Do patients in the trials just want free highs?

Patients seeking to score some free K would be coming to the wrong place if they sign up to UNSW’s trial, Professor Loo says.

First off, administering the drug in the trial is different; it’s highly controlled, and it’s not like it’s happening at a rave.

“People say to me, ‘oh do you get people who put up their hands because it’s a recreational drug and they’re coming for the buzz?’ Ketamine can cause some weird out of body experiences, but they only last for a short amount of time, half an hour or so.

“We’ve found in our study that nobody likes those effects. In fact, they say to me, ‘I don’t know how people use this recreationally!’ They’re certainly not coming for that out of body experience.”

NSW-based patients who are interested in enrolling in the trial, should email: ket.study@unsw.edu.au. Other sites will advertise for patients in the coming months.