I was taking it easy, as only a man without Sky Sports does on a Sunday afternoon, by leafing through back copies of Biological Psychiatry gathering dust in my living room. I was undertaking some further reading after the government’s chief drug adviser, Professor David Nutt, had been sacked for saying that Britain’s drug laws don’t make sense. Statistically, he said, taking ecstasy is less dangerous than riding a horse. Surely not, I thought. Horses are completely legal, and even little kids are allowed to use and own them.

I set out to discover if the Nutty Professor was right about drugs, and whether horses should be made illegal, for myself. As a rational adult, I did not feel that I could simply trust the judgement of a world-renowned expert; I need to come to my own conclusions about the big issues such as climate change, Susan Boyle, and drugs. To my surprise, in my exhaustive research which took most of Sunday afternoon, I unearthed articles which go way further than putting drugs above equestrian on a health and safety chart. The researchers at Biological Psychiatry actually think KETAMINE IS GOOD FOR YOU.

I should point out that I have no qualifications whatsoever in medicine, biology, psychology or any related field, so my level of expertise is on a par with the current Home Secretary and former postman, Alan Johnson. In case you were wondering, he was the guy who sacked David Nutt. But just like the Home Secretary, I also am free to interpret the evidence with my limited understanding of its subject matter and come to my own conclusions.

The first paper I found was written by Robert M. Berman in 2000 (Biological Psychiatry 47: 4, 351-354), experimenting with ketamine as a treatment for depression. Seven lucky souls with severe depression were injected with Special K and tests were taken on the parts of the brain which can determine symptoms of depression- opiate receptors and the like. ‘Baseline’ scores were taken before the tests, and these were indeed some fairly miserable people. And then they were given ketamine, and the same tests were taken again 72 hours later, presumably once they’d come down from the high and stopped listening to Basic Space by The xx. ‘Significant decreases were observed for items of depressed mood, suicidality, helplessness, and worthlessness’, says the report. In short, it seems to have sorted them right out.

The reasons for this right royal cheer-up are complex, but it seems to boil down to two possible outcomes. Either ketamine chemically induces a state of mind which cheers you up, meaning it isn’t a placebo. Or, it doesn’t chemically alter your state of mind as anti-depressants tend to, but the human lab rats had such a good time on the Wobble that it made them happy as a result, like a ride on a bouncy castle may have done. This would mean that it’s a placebo, but a rather good one. Either way, it made them happier which is all that counts.

The second article I found comes from the 2009 (66: 5, pp. 522-526) edition of Biological Psychiatry, by Rebecca B. Price et al. This time K was given to 26 people who were feeling suicidal and had tried other treatments which hadn’t worked. Their level of wanting to top themselves was measured two days before the ket, and then 24 hours after they’d taken it.

Again, the results show ketamine’s remarkable capacity to induce cheeriness. On the MADRS-SI scale, which runs from 6 (Morrissey-esque) to 1 (Lottery Winners on Acid), the horse tranquiliser reduced the scores on the doors by an average of 2.1, which in layman’s terms means they felt about 35% less likely to empathise with over-rated dead rock stars. The study concludes that ‘ketamine has rapid benefitial effects… and warrants further study’. And by study, I assume the researcher means smashing a gram at a squat party. A quick show of hands in the office indicates that the Platform team would be happy to help Dr Price in her studies if she so requires.

Then I came across a research paper which tested recreational ketamine users (i.e. the majority of Platform readers) against people with schizophrenia, and also some healthy non-users (Celia Morgan et al, Biological Psychiatry 2009, 65: 12). This article is much more complicated than the other two, so you may wish to read it yourself to check that I haven’t got the wrong end of the stick here. But it seems to suggest that using ketamine doesn’t really have any long term side-effects, since K users performed better than the schizophrenics and as well as the non-users on all of the tests apart from one, which is a test called the antisaccade task, in which the users did just as badly as the schizophrenics. But since I’ve never heard of anyone needing the pass an antisaccade task to do anything in life- it’s not like a driving test or a Chlamydia test-  I’d say ketamine seems perfectly harmless.

So when it comes to drugs, it seems that Professor David Nutt of Bristol University and Imperial College, and President of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology is right, and Alan Johnson is wrong. Who would have thought it?