NEW ORLEANS—When he first began hearing about ketamine during his freshman year at Tulane University, Diogo Fernandez was surprised. “Ketamine, ha, who actually takes that?” he thought.

By the time Fernandez graduated this spring, he was captain of Tulane’s student-run EMS service and heard more peers talking about using the drug. Fernandez says he was offered ketamine for the first time at a Mardi Gras party during senior year but declined.

Across college campuses, the powerful psychedelic-like anesthetic nicknamed “Special K” is gaining popularity as a party drug. Often snorted as a crystally white powder, students liken it to being drunk without the hangover.

The drug has jumped into the spotlight in the “Cornell 7” case, where a former student alleges she was drugged and gang-raped during a ketamine-fueled night at a fraternity house in 2024. With the ketamine, she told investigators, “lights are on, but nobody’s home. Your brain is not functioning at its proper level.”Ketamine has roared into popular culture in recent years, both as an illicit drug and as an alternative mental-health treatment. “Friends” actor Matthew Perry died after overdosing on the drug. Other celebrities have spoken about entering rehab after becoming addicted.

End Overdose, a nonprofit with more than 60 chapters on college campuses, has started to develop education around ketamine in the past year in response to increasing questions from students, people in the nightlife scene and medical advisers.

“From interactions we’ve had with college and university students, it appears that ketamine use has been rising on college campuses,” said Maddie Ward, chief operating officer at End Overdose.

At Tulane, which is ranked among the nation’s top party schools by Niche.com and other college rating platforms, students describe a “work hard, play hard” campus culture with the refrain “it’s not addiction till you graduate.”A spokesman rejected the party school label but noted that Tulane has a “highly relational campus culture” in a city “known worldwide for its joie de vivre.” terviews, students said they have seen ketamine powder passed around in plastic baggies at fraternity houses, mixed with cocaine to create “Calvin Klein,” and called the psychedelic effects “going horse mode,” a nod to the drug’s use as a veterinary tranquilizer.

“To people on campus, it’s literally just like a regular party drug,” said senior Alya Satchu, who said she has seen the drug used at fraternity house parties, pre-games, other functions off-campus and on major event weekends like Mardi Gras and Halloween.

Part of it, she and other students said, is New Orleans’s experimental culture. The city has some of the country’s highest rates of reported illicit drug use among people 25 or younger, according to the most recent federal estimates.

When a rare snowstorm canceled classes at Tulane last year, students sledded beneath the school’s iconic oak canopy and ran off to a block party by the campus bar. Others were curled up on the dorm room floor after taking too much ketamine, recalled one student who witnessed it.

Michael Arcari, an exercise science major who leads a student coalition promoting safe drug use, said he and other club officers have been asked if fentanyl can be found in ketamine. Arcari, who has avoided the fraternity scene, said he hadn’t personally seen ketamine on campus.

Fernandez, the former Tulane EMS captain, said tracking ketamine has been a “gray area” for the squad, which responds to hundreds of drug and alcohol intoxication calls a semester. A student in a “K-hole,” an intense dissociative state, presents similarly to someone who is intoxicated with alcohol, he said. Patients are often unable or unwilling to disclose the substances they are using, though Tulane’s medical amnesty policy generally protects students in need of help from facing discipline.

Since 2025, Tulane has recorded seven medical calls where ketamine use was reported, said spokesman Michael Strecker, representing a “relatively small” number of overall calls for service.

“The information currently available to us does not indicate a significant increase in reported ketamine-related incidents on or around campus,” Strecker said.

Nationwide since January 2022, 911 calls involving ketamine among 18- to 24-year-olds have nearly doubled, according to aggregate data from Biospatial, an EMS intelligence platform owned by ImageTrend. Suspected nonfatal overdoses among a similar age group have also increased nationwide, the National Drug Early Warning System reported on Oct. 16.

Daniel Sexton, a program manager at Mountainside Treatment Center, which operates in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, said the center has found ketamine use increasing among the people it serves, mostly those under age 26.

Two students at Stanford University required medical attention after using ketamine in 2024, the school said. Dozens of colleges flag ketamine as a date-rape drug.

At Cornell, new students receive information about ketamine during orientation, a spokeswoman said, adding that 99% of students reported they had never used the drug in a recent undergraduate survey.

Ketamine is one of several potent drugs creeping into student life. At the University of Mississippi, two students died last month after consuming kratom-related opioids, according to a criminal complaint. Earlier this month, two teens were charged following the alleged rape and death of a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology who took fentanyl after being told it was cocaine, federal prosecutors in New York announced. At Pennsylvania State University, 13 current and former students are heading toward trial for their alleged involvement in a campuswide cocaine drug ring.

Tulane has bolstered its collegiate recovery program in recent years as more students have opted to remain sober. Phoebe McMahon, a senior who expects to graduate this fall, began attending meetings with the Tulane Recovery Community when she decided to get sober. Though her decision wasn’t related to ketamine use, she said she encountered participants in the recovery program who had joined due to the drug.

McMahon said she was impressed by Tulane’s recovery infrastructure. “I remember feeling like, ‘This is really well resourced,’” she said.