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What all parents should know about ketamine and young people

It’s found in university halls, music festivals, houseshares and even chat-up lines on dating apps – ket has spread through Gen Z

September 18, 2024 6:00 am(Updated 6:01 am)

Long used by doctors and vets as an anaesthetic and painkiller, ketamine is listed by the World Health Organisation as an essential medicine for pain management.

But for an ever-increasing slice of the British population – particularly young people and those in their twenties and thirties – it’s now a byword for a cheap and easy means to get out of your head.

Once confined to the medical and veterinary fields, ketamine (or ket, as it’s widely known) made the leap to recreational club drug in the 2000s via LGBTQ+ nightlife and the underground free party scene. Its mind-altering properties have also contributed to its burgeoning off-label use in the field of psychedelic therapy, though ketamine has not yet been approved by the UK or the US as a treatment for depression or any other psychiatric condition.

These days, you’ll find ket in university halls, music festivals, houseshare living rooms and even referenced in chat-up lines on dating apps. It cuts across class and social divides and has done for years.

In 2014, the Brighton Argus published an obituary for Nancy Lee, a 23-year-old who is considered one of the UK’s first casualties of long-term ketamine abuse. “If someone were to design the perfect drug for a teenager who is depressed and doesn’t have much money, this would be it,” her father told VICE at the time. Former Love Island contestant Bethany Rogers has said that she became addicted to it in 2019 while she was in an abusive relationship and being mercilessly trolled online.

Addiction specialists and clinics are now especially concerned by the rise in young adults seeking help, with one warning in The Guardian this week of a national problem. “I would say from 2020 to now it’s gradually becoming more frequent,” psychiatrist Dr Catherine Carney, who works at the specialist Delamere addiction facility, told The Times. “It’s normally young men [and] women in their early twenties coming in and the primary only addiction is ketamine.”

While opiates, cannabis and alcohol are still the top substances that people seek treatment for, ketamine is inching up the ranks. Over five times more people entered NHS treatment for the drug in 2022-2023 than in 2014-2015. The number of young people in treatment – defined in government statistics as those under the age of 18 – has also risen to six per cent from under one per cent in 2015.

Ketamine exacts an excruciating price on its heaviest users, leading to serious urinary tract problems including what is known as ketamine-induced cystitis. This goes far beyond the discomfort of a garden-variety UTI – at its most extreme, some will be looking at kidney failure. They may need a catheter or to remove their bladder entirely. The intense pain may also have the side effect of trapping them in a vicious cycle of further using the drug as a form of relief.

Why has ketamine become the drug of choice for so many, particularly those belonging to a generation that is thought to be more abstemious than its predecessors? The same traits that make it an effective anaesthetic make it dangerously alluring for those seeking an escape hatch from reality, allowing users to dissociate from the world around them.

But while the malaises facing Gen Z and millennials are well-established – lack of financial security, insecure housing, climate change and a general sense of foreboding around the future – less has been said about the practical reasons why they might want to make a break for the cartoon la-la land of ketamine.

The Class B drug is sold for as little as £20 a gramme on easily accessible platforms like Telegram and Snapchat. That’s less than a decent-sized round of drinks and far below the cost of an average night out in the UK, which increased from £121 in 2022 to £146 this year.

As one 24-year-old student told Time Out: “I’m now more likely to get pissed and do drugs in someone’s living room with 15 to 20 people. There’s no ticket to get in.”

While ketamine is considered less physically addictive than opioids or alcohol, its dissociative effects also makes it highly attractive for those looking to self-medicate their own psychological distress. Owen Bowden-Jones, a psychiatrist who founded the Club Drug clinic, describes it as a “brilliant emotional anaesthetic”, linking it to the “lack of good quality trauma therapy available”.

If mental health services for young people were properly funded and signposted to those who needed them most, would ketamine have less of a draw? If the cost of going out was lower, would people rely on a cheap bag of Class Bs to have fun?

These are uncomfortable questions for a country lagging far behind its European counterparts in mature discussions about drug use and decriminalisation. But if we want to understand the rise in ketamine usage – and its deepening appeal among young people – it’s a conversation that needs to happen.



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