The mid-2000s was the era that shaped ketamine’s enduring image: at once illegal, medically risky, and wildly popular. Its ascendancy as a club drug was indicated by the emergence of dubstep, a genre that was immediately identified as both cause and effect of its spread. Like the drug itself, the sound combined a compulsive rush with a dislocated, mechanised aesthetic, darker and more disembodied than the ecstasy-fuelled styles that preceded it. The term “wonky” emerged to describe both the music and the chemical dissociation that enhanced it. Literary accounts of ketamine remained elusive, but the drug now had its bespoke soundtrack. In 2014 the UK government responded to its growing popularity by raising its legal status to class B. Since then, levels of use have continued to climb, most sharply among 18- to 24-year-olds, whose usage has tripled in the last nine years.