“Got spoons?” asks a message scrawled in pink on a chalkboard enveloped by fluorescent LED lighting. I’m outside a stall in the corner of the vendor village at Shambhala in western Canada, the county’s largest electronic music weekender. It’s early on Friday afternoon and the store, Bits and Keys’, has already sold 500 snuff-style spoons, small spatulas which are typically worn as necklaces and used to sniff ketamine.

“We put them out and they’re gone,” says Mike Nelson, who is working in the Bits and Keys’ booth in the baking British Columbia summer heat on the paradisiacal woodland festival site several kilometers from any road. “We just can’t make them fast enough.” Behind him, two colleagues hurriedly assemble a diverse range of spoons, from simple scoopers for CA$10 to gigantic brass utensils, including one enormous sunflower-shaped spoon, for as much as $40. “A few guys who have brought the big spoons and I’m like, that’s the Sunday spoon, I guess,” Nelson adds, alluding to how the festivalgoers’ tolerance to ketamine will likely be far higher in two days' time.

Ketamine is entering its bling era. The pocket-sized spoon is steadily becoming an underground countercultural symbol, as recreational consumers push back against a mainstream narrative that largely dismisses the drug. Despite its reputation as a horse tranquilizer, many have found everyday transcendence in it.

“I wouldn’t wear this in my everyday life, but I find it really freeing to be able to [wear it] here,” says Robert, who has just brought a spoon with an owl on it. “You need to keep it hidden in the real world.” 

An OG ketamine spoon operation is also incognito at Shambhala. I hear whispers that a rogue organization called the “Dark Side of the Spoon” has set up shop in the campsite, unwilling to pay vendor fees in excess of $10,000 for an official booth. 

In the artist lounge, a DJ informs me that a Dark Side-branded spoon was dropped into his pocket the night before. One of the organizers of a stage tells me that he was also just given a Dark Side of the Spoon gift with engravings paying homage to that very stage. “There’s something about Shambhala that makes ketamine just perfect,” the DJ tells me, referring to a distinct blend of inclusive, silly, and wonky vibes that the social lubricant ketamine appears to help cultivate. “Everyone does it.” 

Over lunch the next day, I chat with a British couple who happen to be seasoned ketamine users. Upon hearing about my assignment, they insist that I immediately go to Dark Side’s camp and give me clear instructions on how to get there. En route, I ask someone where “Heron” camp is, since that is where I have been directed. “Oh, you’re looking for the Dark Side?” they respond. 

Ketamine spoons are estimated to have first emerged about a decade ago among ravers seeking to both better manage their doses and be able to do huge amounts that wouldn’t fit on a key. But the use of personal spoons also reduces the risk of transmitting diseases through shared utensils, like keys. And, let’s be honest, stuffing a dirty key up your hooter isn’t very demure. 

In the past couple of years, it’s become more common on dancefloors to take ketamine with a purpose-made spoon rather than using improvised tools, mirroring the ‘80s wave of luxury cocaine accessories, such as custom spoons, straws, and even mini vacuums. The ketamine spoon phenomenon has created a disparate, nomadic tribe of a highly visible “dissociation generation” of ketamine consumers who — when they do have their spoons on display, at raves and festivals — are prone to sharing their drug of choice with fellow spoon-bearers. 

Boasting a ketamine spoon around one’s neck signals something equally revolutionary and ridiculous. And here I am, spoonless and wilting in the scorching sun, until I set foot in Dark Side of the Spoon’s shaded emporium. Splayed out on a large desk are a few hundred custom sniffing spoons, a host of action character figurines with spoons in their hands going at $50 a pop, Spoon Boy Pokemon-style cards, and dozens of branded two-sided poker chips which are intended to be flipped to ascertain whether one is in the right place or not. I flip one, and it confirms that I am indeed where I am supposed to be.

All of this absurdity screams that ketamine culture has reached a high-water mark and that a lot of ketamine is being consumed — to the extent that ancillary businesses are thriving. This is a characteristic of specific drug subcultures, and only certain substances arrive in this weird nirvana — cannabis, mushrooms, and cocaine, for example — but their moment in the sun always seems fleeting.

“Sometimes it feels like, I don’t know, I’m doing a bad thing because I’m encouraging people to use substances,” says Jeremy Gilron, the enigmatic Dark Side of the Spoon founder, after playing air guitar on a giant wooden spoon for our photoshoot in his renegade camp. “The matrix programming is like, ‘That’s bad.’ But I’m trying to push it in a better direction. I want people to do what they’re going to do anyway in the best way possible, and focus that energy into positive vibes.”

Gilron, a moustached man who tells strangers that he loves them, advises people to “bless their bumps” as they snort ketamine from spoons. “Bless your K and be like, ‘What do I want?’ You tell the crystal, ‘I want to make new friends. I want to get out of my skin. I want to let loose on the dancefloor.’ And boom: You manifest it.” 

He used to be more of a “K connoisseur,” he tells me in the shadow of an underground-famous school bus known as the Millennium Falcon that is a central piece of the Dark Side roadshow. “I was pretty much using it as a depression treatment,” he says in his gravelly drawl. “It would give me energy and loosen up my back, so all the pain would go away for the dancefloor.” Now, Gilron claims to have moderated his usage, having cleared the depression, and is keen to present himself as more of a harm reduction-minded role model where possible. 

A steady stream of spoon-searchers mill into the camp as ‘90s G-funk tunes take over the sound system upon Gilron’s request. As of early Saturday afternoon, they’ve sold more than 500 spoons during the festival, as many as Bits and Keys’ had sold at this point yesterday. But it soon picks up pace, with group after group stumbling in, and Gilron later claims to have sold a few thousand spoons over the course of the weekend, and a quarter of a million in the last decade.

New recruits to the Dark Side get their first spoons for free, and Gilron’s friend, a reserve soldier in the Canadian army, asks if he can “bless your nose” by anointing them on both sides of the nose with the spoon and saying: “Welcome to the dark side.” 

Gilron got his first spoon in 2014, at Shambhala — which has long had leading harm reduction and drug checking services aimed to keep people who use drugs safe — when he traded three capsules of MDMA for a single spoon made out of wire wrap and fashioned onto a necklace. Walking from the campsite to the festival’s downtown, he looked down at his new accessory. “I was like, ‘Damn, this is dope.’ It was one of those lightning bolt moments: ‘Why doesn't everyone have one of these?’” By the next year, he had learned how to create spoons out of wire and would take 100 to each festival and go around campsites selling them. His legend has only mushroomed since then, going to as many as 15 festivals across Canada and the world each year, and becoming a successful entrepreneur — carving out a unique and very zeitgeisty niche in the process.

“Jeremy's like a celebrity,” says the soldier, Ollie, who did not wish to use his real name. “Everybody that you talk to, if they see a [Dark Side] spoon, they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, do you know Jeremy?’” Ollie first bought a spoon from Gilron at Pemberton Music Festival and since last year, has been in the inner spoon circle at Shambhala. “I just love being part of it: It’s hilarious,” Ollie adds, holding up his blingy “Daddy’s Girl” spoon.

But for all the fun and games, one customer, Josh, admits that since he started collecting ketamine paraphernalia, his usage has gone up considerably. “It’s easier to take out,” he says, and my mind wanders to tales of bladders destroyed by heavy ketamine usage and people becoming unmoored from reality and seriously damaging their psyches. And spare a thought for actor Matthew Perry, who k-holed and drowned. But Josh is still convinced of the benefits of ketamine’s loosening effect on the mind and body. “It helps me ease into myself in the rave. If I’m doing something else like molly, I just feel stressed out. This mellows me.”

The notion, however, of a “Dark Side” isn’t necessarily mellow. Naturally, it risks invoking a sense of fear, or visions of an extremely deep, unwanted k-hole, but Gilron says it is simply a fusion of his favorite psychedelic rock album Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, and Star Wars, naturally blended with the verbiage of his beloved spoon. “The alkalization of taking something taboo and finding the best in it like a prism makes a rainbow,” he says, almost sagely.

As I browse the zany collection of bizarre-looking spoons and feel at a loss of which one to pick, Gilron tells me: “It’s like Harry Potter, the spoon chooses the wizard.” And lo, a spoon with a Jesus-piece attached to it soon catches my eye. I am duly anointed by the soldier.

Gilron is making his entire living from the Dark Side operation, and he points to other similar organizations like Spoon Platoon in Australia and Hell in the Melon in the UK, who are all on a shared WhatsApp group chat called Spoon Squad. “Spoonings the love of the game,” he declares with one of many catchphrases. But Gilron, in a perplexing aside, insists that his business is not ketamine-focused per se, but “tiny spoon” focused. “We'll be on the dance floor, and someone will have half a watermelon, and there's like eight people all taking tiny little bites out of it with their spoons.”

After leaving Gilron, I’m told of a “Ketamine Olympics” competition which is said to be taking place at the river this Saturday afternoon. The competition involves so-called athletes consuming a requisite amount of ketamine and then taking part in various competitive exercises like racing down the river on floaties, three-legged races, tug-of-war, and much more. En route there, I amble past a group in a floatie offering “mystery bumps” to anyone who wishes to snort an anonymous white powder. I do not hang around long enough to discover the identity of the drug, but I do pass a man wearing a huge “K” necklace made to look like diamonds encrusted in gold.

Further towards an area known as “muscle beach” on the bank of the river is where I learn the longstanding Ketamine Olympics did take place, until a year ago, when festival security and police sternly warned the freewheeling organizer to no longer give out generous amounts of ketamine after a competitor k-holed during the 50-person river race and floated 15 miles downstream and into the U.S. 

“First place has to do a gram line of ketamine. I’m Hawaiian, you can’t K-hole a Hawaiian," the victor of the final Ketamine Olympics told the Psyched Substance YouTube channel last year. “I got a high tolerance. I’m a big wave surfer, bro. I told my mum: She was like, proud of me.” 

Now, however, the competition is just a sober floatie race, and I’ve just missed it. “They weren't just giving it out like before,” the Hawaiian man later tells me. “Before it was like a ‘K’ trophy, and now it's a boat race trophy. They're making so much money here at that festival now, they kind of have to be more, you know…”

Safety-conscious? Meanspirited? Anti-ketamine? He does not finish his sentence, but don’t be surprised if you soon see people outside of festivals and clubs with tiny spoons around their necks.

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