New York—One is an anticonvulsant first approved in the 1990s to treat seizures that has been heavily promoted in recent years for dozens of off-label uses, in many cases leading to widespread abuse. The other is a five-decade staple of anesthesiology, battle-tested during the Vietnam War, that became widely abused as a street drug before recently being discovered as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression.
In a session on “old drugs reinvented” at the 2019