Bass Musician Mr. Bill Wants to Have a Talk About Ketamine

There are clinics in Colorado that use esketamine (a less potent version of ketamine) for treatment-resistant depression. But outside of a clinical setting, the dissociative tranquilizer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“When you go into a clinical setting, you're doing actual ketamine, whereas if you're on the street, who knows what you're doing,” says Bill Day, the well-respected bass music producer, DJ and educator who goes by the moniker Mr. Bill. “When I walked into rehab, I tested positive for cocaine, methamphetamine and a few other things, and I definitely wasn’t doing any of those. That was in my ketamine.”

Day believes that it’s easy to brush off ketamine because of the pervasive mythologies that surround it. “One of the big things that I felt myself, and also hear a lot, is that it's not dangerous, and people look at it as this really benign thing. They're like, ‘Oh it's just ketamine, it’s not that bad,’ he says. “But it’s really bad for you at the doses and frequency they are doing it at. People say that it's not, but it's horrible. It's really fucking bad for you.”

Day called Denver home between 2015 and 2020, initially moving here from Australia to pursue his music career (most of his fan base was in Denver). During that period, he began to notice ketamine's impact on the city's music scene. "People are referring to it lately as hippie heroin, and if everyone's just all smacked out all the time, events are boring, and it's not the kind of event you want to attend as a fan — unless you're also an addict, I suppose — or the kind of fans you want to play to as an artist, really," he says.

"Energy, vibes and awesome, honest, pure and true connection with other like-minded human beings is the best part of the core of the electronic music movement, and ketamine kills that," Day continues. "It kills the energy, and therefore the vibe. And you can't really have a good, honest connection with someone else when you're on ketamine — at least I couldn't. You want to go out to a place where everyone's bubbly and having fun, and the music and the event seem larger than life because everyone's just so stoked and into it. This is the absolute opposite of what an event where everyone is on K feels like, from my experience, both as an avid user of the substance and a now-sober artist playing these types of events from time to time."

Day has been sober for the past six months, but before that, his frequent ketamine use impacted his relationships and personal life in ways that were both unsustainable and dangerous. “It was destroying my relationships with people," he recalls. "I broke up with my girlfriend, I ended up in jail on one occasion, and went to the hospital multiple times incredibly sick."

He had initially seen the drug as a salve for his workaholic ways, but it eventually just made him unreliable. “Obviously, going to the hospital is much worse, but that only happened a couple of times versus not showing up to meetings or being unreliable, which happened daily. That was making me super depressed and made me feel like a piece of shit,” he says. “I like to be able to say I'm gonna be here and do this interview and then actually get on the call and show up, whereas when I was doing all this ketamine, I'd make all these plans to do podcasts with people, make plans to go meet up with friends or work on a collab with somebody on the Internet, and I just wouldn't show up to any of them.”

That impact on his reliability and work was also destroying Day’s creative process: “I was starting a lot of [tracks], but if you look at those sessions of the stuff that I started, it was just bullshit, like a couple of noises that don't even make sense.”

If it wasn’t for his sobriety, Day believes he would not have finished Phantasmagorical, the remix followup to his 2021 album, Phantasmagoria, which he also wrote sober (he wasn’t doing ketamine during the pandemic). “When I'm sober, I'm more focused," he explains. "I'm able to focus my energy on a couple of things a day and get those few things done and then...go to bed, wake up the next day, do a couple more things. I'm just more comfortable with a manageable daily routine with actionable tasks, rather than a blur of unwinding thoughts, with zero ability to focus on any of them."

Rehab was something that Day had thought about for a long time, as other techniques weren’t effective. At first he tried abstaining, and when that didn’t work, he turned to therapy, which also failed (he was doing lines while on Zoom calls with his therapist). “It just got to a point where all my friends around me were like, ‘You have to go to rehab, you’re going to the hospital all the time, you’re basically gonna kill yourself if you don't,'” he recalls.

But, he notes, you can’t just drop everything and go to rehab. There are many obstacles, such as finding a facility that accepts your insurance and has available space, and the fact that you'll be isolated from the world for a time. “One of the hardest things about going to rehab is you have to figure out who deals with all of your shit. My house is just here. What about my cat? My cat needs to be fed. What about shows I’ve booked?” he says.

Day credits a friend with helping him take care of these obstacles. “I was really grateful for that friend in my life at the time who was just like, ‘No, you have to go.' She didn’t force me to go, but she put all the pieces in place so that going was an option,” he remembers. Day chose to go to rehab and has been sober since.

But he knows his circumstances aren’t like everyone's. “On one hand, I want to say, if you have a friend who's addicted to ketamine, go figure out a way to get them into rehab, figure out a way to sort out all the shit for a month, and just drive them there and drop them off, because that was helpful for me. But you can't force anyone to do anything, right?” he says. “So I think one thing you can do is...help them figure out how to manage some of these responsibilities for a month to facilitate them going to rehab for that time to circumvent some of the anxiety associated with the process of going to rehab.

“If you keep telling yourself that you're not addicted but you're spending a thousand bucks a month or whatever on ketamine and not showing up to your appointments and feel the strong urge to want to do it all the time, maybe you're addicted and need help," Day says. "I can't speak for anyone else. It's absolutely your call if those things are a problem for you, but certainly in my case it was."