A Detailed Guide to Testing Your Ketamine at Home
Here on r/ketamine, we see a lot of posts where someone has taken a drug they thought was ketamine, but based on their experience, they suspect it was something else, or that their ketamine was adulterated. This is obviously concerning because drug substitutions and adulterations can be extremely dangerous, even potentially fatal. So I wanted to make a post to raise community awareness of a simple and effective harm reduction method: pre-consumption reagent testing.
In order to use drugs safely, you want to establish two things:
• The substance is what it's claimed to be, and
• The substance does not contain any additional, undisclosed substances
While lab testing is the gold standard, at-home reagent and fentanyl strip testing is very effective. Note that this post is meant to cover the basics and will not delve into every single irregularity that can occur when testing ketamine.
REAGENT TESTING KETAMINE
It's always best to use multiple reagents when testing a substance. This gives you the best chance at spotting any irregularities. Reagent tests are only presumptive tests. There's a lot of overlap between the results that different substances produce, so there are lots of opportunities for false positives. But for every additional reagent you use, your likelihood of a misidentification decreases.
It is important to recognize this limitation of reagents. Reagents can often spot irregularities, but they can't definitively identify a substance. As DanceSafe says: Reagents are a search for red flags, not green lights.
Buy a reagent kit that contains at least three reagents. I recommend the following reagents for a base level ketamine testing kit:
• Morris
• Liebermann
• Froehde
And for a more complete kit:
• Mecke
• Zimmerman
Morris is the primary reagent used to confirm the presence of ketamine. Morris turns purple in the presence of ketamine, while it turns blue in the presence of most ketamine analogues. 2-FDCK is the exception - it will give the same purple Morris reaction as ketamine. Most of the other drugs that have purple Morris reactions are cathinones, a class of drugs that is unlikely to be distributed as ketamine.
A couple of important notes about testing with Morris:
• Morris is a two-part reagent. You apply both Morris A and Morris B to the same sample in succession. Sometimes testing newbies add Morris A to one sample, and Morris B to a different sample, leading to false negatives. Stir the reagent-drug sample mixture with a toothpick for 30 seconds after applying Morris B.
• Morris is extremely sensitive to sample size. Ketamine samples over 5mg will produce a false negative blue reaction. Be sure to use a very small ketamine sample, less than 5mg, of your ketamine when testing with Morris. Your sample should be approximately the size of a few grains of table salt. If you get a blue Morris reaction, always retest with a smaller sample size to confirm.
Liebermann is a great second reagent for ketamine. Prior to the development of Morris for ketamine testing, Lieberman was the primary reagent used for testing ketamine. Ketamine produces a light yellow Liebermann reaction.
In addition to confirming the presence of ketamine, Liebermann can also spot cuts like lidocaine, levamisole, ephedrine, or phenacetin. The first three substances turn Liebermann an orange/red color, while phenacetin turns Liebermann purple. In reagent testing, when multiple reactive substances are present, the darkest reaction wins out. So if you have ketamine mixed with one of those cuts, you'll be able to see that cut's Liebermann reaction and know it's there because their orange/red or purple reactions are darker than ketamine's yellow reaction.
Froehde is useful for spotting synthesis impurities, PMA, PMMA, and other adulterants. Ketamine doesn't react to Froehde, so if you get any Froehde reaction while testing ketamine, you know something is there that isn't supposed to be. For example, a common ketamine precursor will turn Froedhe blue if it is present. For other Froehde reaction colors, use the DrugsPro app to see what substance that color might indicate.
Mecke is another good reagent to check for adulterants, since it reacts to things like lidocaine, but doesn't react to ketamine.
Finally, Zimmerman is useful for distinguishing ketamine from 2-FDCK and cathinones. As noted above, 2-FDCK can fool the Morris reagent by giving the same purple reaction as ketamine. Zimmerman is helpful for this because, while it will mostly not react to ketamine (you may see some small violet spots), it produces a full purple reaction to 2-FDCK.
Zimmerman is also useful for ruling out a cathinone substitution or adulteration. This isn't extremely common, but it's happened before, so it's always good to check. If you get a full purple and/or brown Zimmerman reaction, then you'll know something else is present.
FENTANYL STRIP TESTING
As most of you know, fentanyl is an extremely potent and deadly synthetic opioid that is sometimes found as an adulterant in other drugs. While fentanyl contamination in ketamine is not a common occurrence, fentanyl strip testing is affordable, easy, and quick, and could save your life. Fentanyl strip testing is especially important with drugs like ketamine that are usually snorted, because fentanyl has a high intranasal bioavailability. Also consider that many ketamine users do not use opioids and therefore have no pre-existing opioid tolerance to protect them from an unintended fentanyl exposure.
So I strongly encourage all ketamine users, especially those in North America, to test their ketamine for the presence of fentanyl. This is done very quickly and easily with fentanyl test strips. You simply dissolve your drug in water, dip the test strip into the water for a few seconds, remove it and wait a few minutes to see if the negative test line appears.
Because fentanyl strips are extremely sensitive and can detect very small quantities of fentanyl, fentanyl strip testing can be done via random sampling. Crush and mix your ketamine batch thoroughly, and draw your test sample from multiple different parts of the bag. Of course, if you want to be extra cautious, you can test your entire batch of ketamine. Fentanyl strips don't contaminate or destroy the drug they come into contact with, so whatever you test will still be safe to consume after. You can easily recover your dry drug by evaporating the water in a warm oven following these instructions
Be sure to follow the strip manufacturer's instructions for the dilution ratio - the amount of drug sample relative to the amount of water used. Incorrect dilution ratios can cause false positives. Note also that any second line counts - even if it's very faint. If any fentanyl is present, it will immediately and irreversibly destroy the color agent that makes up the second line.
Finally, while fentanyl testing is extremely effective, it never hurts to have a backup precaution in place. Narcan is a nasal spray version of the potent and fast acting opioid blocking drug, Naloxone. Get some Narcan and keep it with you whenever you use drugs, whatever drugs those may be. Carry Naloxone - Never Use Alone.
LAB TESTING
Lab testing is the gold standard of drug testing. It can definitively identify your substance, spot the presence of adulterants or impurities that reagents cannot, and even sometimes identify those adulterants and inform you how much is present.
There's several labs that accept samples of controlled substances in this list curated by the r/ReagentTesting moderation team:
Thank you so much for reading this post! If you have any comments, corrections, additions, or questions, please leave them below. Stay safe and happy rolling!
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
r/ReagentTesting - post results photos and videos of your test results, and get help from reagent test vendors and other knowledgeable people
Reagent and Fentanyl Strip Vendors (International)
DrugsPro - Get safe use information and testing guidance on thousands of substances
Find Naloxone and Sterile Syringes (United States)
A special thank you to u/PROtestkit_eu and my other fellow mods at r/ReagentTesting for all of the excellent resources you developed and guidance you provide on reagent testing, both of which were invaluable in creating this guide.