“If someone were to design the perfect drug for a teenager who is depressed and doesn’t have much money, this would be it…”
Ketamine is one of the more interesting drugs out there. It can make you feel relaxed, wobbly, trippy or, at a high dose, can send you down the K-hole, a state of intense detachment. Once the preserve of a few “psychonauts” in the Seventies, now the dissociative, hallucinogenic tranquiliser seems to be everywhere. It’s cheap, easy to get hold of and crosses social and class boundaries — wastewater analysis released last week found its use had increased by 85% in the past year. And while its popularity has been on the rise since the turn of the century, its unique high is especially embraced today by those aged between 16 and 24. Eclipsing MDMA, almost as popular as cocaine; Generation Z are now three times more likely to use ketamine than they were a decade ago.
Inevitably, the authorities, fired up by the mainstream media, have caught on. Citing the drug’s rising prevalence, its ability to ruin people’s bladders and its use in spiking, the Government wants to curtail its use by bumping it up from a Class B to a Class A drug, on a par with crack and heroin. Yet as history shows, moral panics about illicit substances often only tell half of their story. Drugs are never taken in isolation; they are taken for a reason. A drug’s rise or fall in popularity says something about the people taking them, but also the world they live in.
Ketamine was first developed back in the Sixties when it was tested on prison inmates who claimed it made them feel like “they had no arms or legs, or that they were dead”. Approved for medical use in the Seventies, the US army used it as a battlefield anaesthetic during the Vietnam War. Closer to home, vets started using it to tranquillise horses (and camels) before surgery. Meanwhile, in the wake of the counterculture revolution, the psychonauts were experimenting, enjoying how it opened new doors of perception.
One such adventurer, the American, John C. Lilly, who was given funding by NASA to teach dolphins to speak, routinely injected ketamine while in a flotation tank. It led him to believe earth was being controlled by aliens, who one day stole his penis. As he wrote: “That evening I took 150 milligrams of ketamine, and suddenly the Earth Coincidence Control Office removed my penis and handed it to me. I screamed in terror. My wife Toni came running in from the bedroom, and she said, ‘It’s still attached.’ So I shouted at the ceiling, ‘Who’s in charge up there? A bunch of crazy kids?’”
The kids of today clearly see something in this drug too. “I’ve tried weed, coke, shrooms, LSD, MDMA, and ketamine — obviously,” says 23-year-old Lucas*, a musician from London. “But I find coke really boring. Ketamine is the most fun. It actually makes me feel different, not just in my body but in how I think.” And this is very much part of its appeal.
The drug first popped up in the UK as “techno smack” and “brown acid” on the UK’s “crusty” free party scene in Bath and Bristol. It was a much cheaper, more squalid alternative to ecstasy or LSD. One former party goer said it wasn’t just the techno crusties taking it back then, it was also “oddball” farmers’ sons. “They had access to it as it was a horse tranquiliser. They would descend into incoherency and then basically sit in the corner in their K-hole for a few hours.” Then, via the gay clubbing scene, a classic route into the mainstream, it was adopted as a post-ecstasy, post-club, chill-out drug. Some dealers mixed it with cocaine and sold it as CK1. By the late 2000s, it had become one of the preferred drugs of UK university students, because it was cheap and cerebral. It still, though, had a scuzzy reputation compared to ecstasy and cocaine. Its users were usually the ones who ended up on all fours at the wedding disco.
Then, before you knew it, ketamine was all over the summer music festival scene; an Instagram account called Ketflix and Pills had 1.3 million followers; and models were walking down runways wearing tops that read “Ketamine Chic” — a fashion trend characterised by “an embrace of disheveled aesthetics”.
Amy, a bar worker who is now 23, got into ketamine when she was 19. “We would go out, drink a lot, then head to an afters where we would completely dissociate from the slugs. We were all just completely out of it for hours.” Alex, 21, takes it at his friend’s mum’s house. “I once got really worried that my legs didn’t belong to me and that they were someone else’s legs. I think we were just watching Star Wars at the time.”
Surprisingly, for a drug that can make you forget whether your legs are your own legs, it is seen as one of the more manageable highs. In small doses, it’s shorter lasting than ecstasy, and less intensive than LSD and magic mushrooms. It’s a little like getting tipsy. This means it can be treated as an every-day sort of drug — easy to take a line at lunch breaks or in the loos at school. Alternatively, you can go deep into the K-hole. Luke has been taking ketamine since his late teens. “People really enjoy that completely otherworldly thing,” he says. “I guess a bit like an acid ego death, it completely transports you out of your reality in a way that coke, MD, even shrooms don’t.” There’s no hangover, nor a depressive comedown. And it’s around half the price of cocaine. Why bother socialising when you can dissociate together.
But Generation Z’s fondness for ketamine goes deeper than this.
“From what I’ve seen, young people’s ketamine use is largely a response to an overwhelming sense that the world isn’t going in the right direction, and this tends to lead to wanting to detach from reality, or at least taking a holiday from it,” says Chloe Combi, an author and consultant specialising in Gen Z. These youngsters were already suffering from unusual levels of anxiety and stress, dosing themselves with benzos such as Xanax. But then the pandemic hit.
“For a group of people turning 18 during lockdown who should have been out clubbing, ketamine was a way of experiencing the trippiness of drugs whilst being alone,” says Abigail, a 23-year-old fashion assistant from Reading. “Like you can go to another realm and back from your own bed basically. That would have been the appeal. A lot of ketamine addiction seems to have started during lockdown.”
Part of this is about feelings of dissatisfaction that are haunting Generation Z, Abigail says. “There’s a song by Steve Lacy [a 26 year old American musician] where he sings: ‘Baby, you got something in your nose/Sniffin’ that K, did you fill the hole?’” she says. “This idea of using ketamine to fill a hole, I get it. There’s a sense of emptiness in our generation, a disillusionment shaped by years spent behind screens, lockdown isolation, phone addiction, and constant online comparison.
“It’s no coincidence that ketamine and social media addictions have risen simultaneously. Our attention spans have shortened, and the hobbies we used to spend time on — reading, sports — now have to be carved out from endless screen time in the midst of a boredom epidemic. There’s a constant guilt around being online 24/7, yet it feels impossible to stop, and ketamine is a way out of that dilemma.”
But ketamine is far from a consequence-free cure-all for Gen Z ennui.
“Ketamine is far from a consequence-free cure-all for Gen Z ennui.”
In 2014, back when ketamine was first emerging, I interviewed the friends and family of Nancy Lee from Brighton. She had died earlier that year, aged 23, after several years of heavy ketamine use which had started at the age of 16. It was a tragic story. Her group of friends had started using the drug when it was available at 12 grams for £90. It was her dad who told me that it was the perfect drug for a depressed teenager.
By the age of 21, due to the effects of heavy ketamine use on her bladder and appetite, Nancy was hospitalised, weighing just over five stone and suffering from incontinence and a weak heart due to malnutrition. Her bladder barely functioned. “I was quite depressed,” Nancy wrote after coming out of the hospital in 2011. “K takes your mind to a different world so you forget the bad stuff. But in the end, ketamine becomes the bad stuff.” Unlike the tragic death of Leah Betts from ecstasy, which triggered a moral panic and national outcry, Nancy’s death barely registered in the media.
Ten years on, though, and the heavy ketamine use of Nancy and her friends has become less of a rarity, with doctors seeing a rise in young people with shrunken bladders trashed by chronic ketamine use. Meanwhile, the damage to the urinary tract caused by intensive ketamine use can cause debilitating abdominal pain known as “K-cramps”, which can, in turn, lead to users taking more ketamine to deal with the pain.
Lucy*, now a 24-year-old teacher who does not use drugs, became addicted to ketamine during university. She ended up snorting 12 grams every week and suffered terrible K cramps. She thinks she had an “addiction to dissociation, fuelled by guilt and self-loathing”. Every time she took the drug, she would feel that guilt and shame, and the only way to escape those feelings was to take it again, to completely dissociate from reality. And because the effects are so short-lived, this became a self-perpetuating cycle of self-abuse. In the end, Lucy was faced with a stark choice: ketamine or her dream job as a teacher. But addiction of any kind is hard to kick.
The appeal of ketamine is complicated by the fact that public figures such as Elon Musk openly admit to using it to treat low mood. And its “nitty” reputation has been cleansed — or disguised — by a burgeoning wellness industry which cites it as a useful treatment for depression, among other things. Ketamine therapy has become big business in the US where its popularity matches the trajectory of the “psychedelic renaissance” of magic mushrooms, LSD and DMT in medicine. That’s all very well if you are medicating under controlled conditions. It’s quite different if you’re buying it on the streets.
What we do know about addiction — whether it’s to heroin, alcohol or ketamine — is that those most likely to suffer the most are those who are most vulnerable: the hopeless, the depressed and the traumatised. Young people with undiagnosed mental health issues are well-known to self-medicate and we know that the lockdown generation, more so than any other in history, is suffering from a blizzard of anxieties.
And while the vast majority of Britain’s estimated 172,000 16-24 year olds who admitted to taking ketamine in the past year only use the drug infrequently, in low doses and with little problem, its rise in popularity has come with consequences. The database for drug treatment (NDTMS) shows that the number of under-18s receiving treatment for a ketamine problem increased from 500 to 1,200 between 2020 to 2025, a similar number for cocaine and ecstasy, but far less than for cannabis (12,500).
There has, too, been a rise in deaths. Everyone heard about Matthew Perry’s death through drowning after taking the drug. And only this month, the drag star, The Vivienne, died from a cardiac arrest caused by its effects. Unpublished figures seen by UnHerd show there were 49 deaths linked to ketamine registered in England and Wales in 2023, a three-fold increase in the past decade. Meanwhile, analysis of 19 ketamine deaths in the northwest of England, carried out by the Public Health Institute at Liverpool John Moores University, found that most often ketamine was a contributing factor in deaths rather than people dying from direct toxicity. Three drowned in the bath at home, having taken ketamine beforehand. One person died in a canal: entering it intentionally after taking ketamine.
Last week, Fiona Measham, an expert in drug harm reduction at Liverpool University, visited a new ketamine clinic in St Helens in Merseyside, where a third of the patients receiving treatment were under 18. “These are kids who have been taking it frequently enough for several years to already have serious health problems. They were mostly from a working-class background around St Helens. Nearly one in 10 of them are referred on to have their bladder removed and a permanent urine bag.”
What, then, are we to make of the government’s push to increase the punishment for those caught in possession of or dealing ketamine? Professor Harry Sumnall, an expert in substance misuse at Liverpool John Moores University, is part of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which will advise the Home Office on whether to make ketamine a Class A drug. He says we cannot afford to get it wrong again.
“Ketamine was made a Class B drug in 2014,” he told me. “This provided the ideal opportunity to ensure that sufficient attention was paid to prevention, harm reduction, and treatment activities. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen, and this has led to many of the concerns that we have with ketamine today.”
Given the drug’s increasing prevalence, it’s unlikely the Government’s “message” will scare young people off. As Abigail says, “well, loads of people my age do cocaine, and that’s Class A, it’s not stopped them.” If anything, as life gets ever bleaker for Gen Z with extortionate rent, dwindling opportunity and a mistrusted political class, they’ll be taking more drugs.
As more young people increasingly seek escape from their earthbound reality, the Government is heading down its usual bone-headed path to prohibition to solve a complicated problem they don’t understand. And we know from experience that this simply doesn’t work. If politicians were really sincere about helping the teenagers who are worst affected, they might think of more effective ways to address their feelings of despair, because sometimes, the drugs do work.
*Names have been changed.
