Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Rosewater Ketamine

I was told a good story the other day. When ketamine was first becoming popular, in those dark days between the shit Es and the shit coke, it was easy to buy in India. I don’t know if it still is or not, but at that time you could easily buy it in any Indian chemist. Then you’d dissolve it in water (or it came ready dissolved) and send it back off to England. The most popular way was in bottles of rosewater. So this one canny Indian, he looks at all these English people buying rosewater, day after day, buying bottles of rosewater and sending them back to England. So he thinks, “This is very strange. I’ve never heard of a white man’s craze for rosewater, despite my many cousins in Southall and Birmingham. Perhaps they are not aware of it.” So he asks them, “have you heard about a craze for Indian rosewater?” and they think about it and they tell him no, never. So it seems simple. Lets import the rosewater ourselves. The market is there for us, at our mercy. All we have to do is strike.

And so it came about that ten years later, a lot of Indian shops carry a lot of tatty looking rosewater.