This article contains references to illegal drug use.
Lily was 17 when she first tried ketamine. She was at her friend’s house, and he told her the effects made him feel like he was floating outside of himself. “All I remember of that first trip is walking up the stairs in his house and feeling like I was ascending into Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting,” Nottinghamshire-based Lily, now 25, recalls. “From that point on, I knew I wanted to feel that way all the time.”
So she did. First, Lily took ketamine on weekends, usually at parties. Eventually, her use spiralled into a full-blown dependency, crescendoing at an alarming four to five grams a day. For reference, a particularly heavy dose of ketamine, for the average user, is around 150 milligrams or more. A more common dose is around 30-75 mg.
In many ways, ketamine (also known as ket or just ‘K’) is the UK’s drug du jour, particularly among Gen Z. Since it was first banned in 2006, ketamine has only become more popular as a recreational drug with use, having doubled since 2016, now at its highest since records began. According to government statistics, around 18% of young people aged 16 to 24 have used drugs recreationally, with 2.9% having used ketamine. As is always the case with statistics about drug use, that figure is likely to be higher, particularly among university students, who have tried ketamine at twice the rate of the general youth population. Although it is not the most used drug among the 16 to 24 age group (that’s cannabis), ketamine use continues to grow while other recreational drugs, like cocaine, ecstasy and nitrous oxide, fall out of favour.
I wish more people were able to access this therapy that helped me face my dysmorphia and self-esteem issues.
Now a legitimate treatment option for depression and even addiction, ketamine has transcended university living rooms and the bathroom stalls of East London club nights into therapy rooms and the C-suites of Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, for instance, reportedly takes microdoses of ketamine to help treat depression. Indeed, taken in controlled, therapeutic environments, the benefits of ketamine can be life-changing. In recreational settings, the effects can range from enhanced musical appreciation and increased energy to complete incapacitation, depending on how much you take. A fuzzy, floaty, dissociative drug, which leaves you feeling detached from the physical realm, ketamine can offer a dose of escapism for anyone looking.
For people like Lily, this promise is irresistible — and it's no longer surprising to hear of young women falling into the swirly, soporific grasp of ketamine addiction. In the last year, doctors have warned of the “explosion” of young people undergoing surgery for ketamine-related bladder problems, and – while the number of people seeking treatment for ketamine addiction makes up a tiny proportion of the number of people who use ketamine recreationally – the latest ONS figures show that there has been a rise in adults entering treatment with ketamine problems.
Within three years of her first bump, Lily was using ketamine daily. Josh Torrance, a drug researcher at the University of Bristol, tells GLAMOUR that the “social accessibility” of ketamine means “it can creep into daily use a lot easier”. This is especially true, he says, among the 16 to 30 cohort, and especially those who go out or party regularly. “It's just very normal to have quite regular and quite high levels of use,” he says.
Francesca*, 24, who wants to remain anonymous, first tried ketamine at 15 and started using it socially when she was 17, but it was only when she went to university that her use began to slowly spiral. “It was so much more readily available, and I ended up using it a lot more because I preferred it to drinking,” she says. Although her dependency intensified over the last nine months, Francesca believes it began around two years ago when she started to use ketamine alone “going on binges”. Eventually, she was using ketamine “essentially every day” and consuming up to 20 grams per week.
Torrance says that the cost of ketamine, which is currently at its lowest price since it was prohibited, has a lot to do with its increase in popularity. The problem is, when the price of a drug is lower, people may be pressured to purchase more in one go, because dealers have a minimum spend requirement for making the journey to drop it off. This could see some people buying three grams where they used to buy one. “Then there’s just so much of it that it starts to get treated like table salt,” says Torrance.
Francesca can attest to this. When she moved away from London to the outskirts of another UK city, she managed to stop using ketamine for around three weeks. Eventually, she found a dealer, but there was a catch. “I would have to pick up the minimum order, [which was] 22 grams,” she says. “So then I would end up having that in front of me and I have no restraint — if I come home from work and it’s there, I’m going to do it.” Soon enough, Francesca was spending £300 roughly every single week.
The only reason she was able to get away with this is that she doesn’t know her housemates, so there was nobody to suspect that anything was wrong. However, while living with her parents, Francesca would lie about going to the supermarket to meet her dealer, and then she’d hide in her room where she could take ketamine uninterrupted.
“I have to stop drinking because it's making me eat. It's making me break my diet.”
Of course, it is not the accessibility of ketamine alone that drives dependency. Many people use the drug occasionally, at raves or parties. But, as with most addictions, ketamine dependency – which is considered to be psychological rather than physical – often stems from something deeper. As Torrance explains, people who use ketamine regularly are attempting to self-medicate for something like depression or ADHD.
Francesca has been diagnosed with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD). “I've been using [ketamine] to self-medicate for my mental health issues,” she says. “I have childhood trauma, and when I’d get these intense emotions or flashbacks, I’d use ketamine to stop me from feeling the uncomfortable emotions and the physical sensations that would come with that.”
Unfortunately, this is often a double-edged sword. While ketamine may temporarily alleviate symptoms of depression, for example, it also makes it worse over time. “It’s this paradox of drug use,” says Torrance. “In a year's time with regular use, they'll just be really depressed all the time, and it's like this vicious cycle because then they end up doing more.” Oftentimes, all of this happens subconsciously. “[People who use ketamine to alleviate their symptoms] may not even realise that that's part of the mechanism that's driving their use,” says Torrance. “All they experience is just the urge to do, to use, and they respond to it.”
Lily can’t pinpoint the moment she became dependent. “I have a long history of addiction in my family [and] I have experienced traumatic relationships and events which probably triggered my addiction, but I think regardless of these events I would’ve become an addict at some point in my life,” she says. “I’m someone whose life and emotions have always felt unmanageable, always seeking to escape the way I feel.”
Escapism, says Torrance, is a huge facet of ketamine dependency, particularly for those who take large doses. In smaller doses, he explains, ketamine can offer “feelings of pleasure, euphoria, a sense of relaxation and light relief from whatever is bothering you”. In higher doses, some people enter what is known as a k-hole, a state of profound disorientation and extreme detachment, which is similar psychologically to a hallucinogenic or psychedelic trip – but which often renders people physically unresponsive. “It’s oblivion,” says Torrance. “It's a way to completely remove yourself from reality”.
The more Lily used, the more she struggled to find her way back to reality. “My grip on reality was very shaky,” she says. “I became nearly psychotic, assuming the world was out to get me [and that] people were watching me and plotting against me. The feeling of being broken and an outsider got worse and worse the more I used but K felt like the only solution to those feelings.” Lily began to experience “extreme anxiety and panic attacks” and would often faint during these episodes, including one time on the tube. Extreme anxiety and panic attacks, fainting from the panic attacks (most notably on the tube).
Lily also started experiencing “suicidal thoughts and a desire to simply not exist, while simultaneously not being quite sure if I even did exist.”
The issue with taking such high doses is that tolerance builds up rapidly, meaning that someone who uses ket every day would need to use more and more for the same effects — Francesca laments how a single gram used to last her three nights out, now “a gram doesn’t do much at all”.
Lily, a model, even began taking ket while at work (“when it got really bad”). Although people knew she was using ketamine, they didn’t know the extent of it. “They thought I took it most days but didn’t realise it was the first thing I did when I woke up,” says Lily. “My social life was virtually non-existent, aside from friends who also used to the same degree I did.” She says she doesn’t know how she managed to juggle her normal life with her dependency, but that any “semblance of normality disappeared” the deeper she spiralled. “I started missing work or having to leave halfway through the day because I was in pain from cramps or vomiting because of the damage done to my stomach and gallbladder,” she says.
Such physical symptoms are the greatest cause for concern when it comes to ketamine dependency. Of course, as Torrance notes, there is a limit to how much ketamine one person can consume in one sitting, and that dose is much lower than one that could cause a pharmacological overdose. One study conducted on rodents found that the dose required to overdose when injecting ketamine is around 2.7 grams. However, especially in the UK, ketamine is mostly snorted, so the dose required to overdose is much higher. (That said, ketamine can still cause death by knocking someone unconscious, which could then lead to them dying through constricted airways, choking on vomit or, as in the tragic case of Friends actor Matthew Perry, drowning.)
Medical misogyny reigns supreme.
Lily says she experienced “serious gallbladder complications” – a potential side effect of extreme ketamine use which can cause abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting – and hospital visits due to severe chest pains. She would then use even more ketamine to “blot out” the “extreme” physical pain — another double-edged sword.
The most common issue associated with high ketamine use is damage to the bladder and urinary tract, also known as ketamine bladder. Lily says she needed to go to the toilet “every 10 minutes or so”. “I’d avoid drinking water because I knew I’d have to go to the bathroom almost immediately after,” she says. Francesca has also experienced debilitating bladder issues. “I've had numerous UTIS, kidney infections, bladder infections that I've had to go to A&E for, which led to me having quite a few cystoscopies,” she says. “I got to the point where I was pretty much incontinent, and I was [passing] the lining of my bladder [in my urine].”
This almost completely derailed Francesca’s life. “It's affected my friendships, my work relationships, my family, it's changed my personality — like I am a completely different person,” she says. “Especially when I'm in physical pain — when I get the flare-ups, the pain is immense. I'm throwing up, I literally can't move for days, I can't sleep, my back is in agony, my kidneys are in agony, my bladder is in agony.
“I literally can't move so I can't do anything that's expected of me when I'm suffering like that.”
Francesca’s social life suffered, too. “My friendships have suffered because either I’m lying to them or I'm under the influence, or I just cancel plans so that I can do ket or I'm ill from ket and I can't hide it,” she says. Although her friends knew she was taking ketamine, Francesca didn’t want them to know how bad things were.
But she also lost her relationship with herself. “I've lost interest in all my hobbies and I can't do anything I enjoy,” she says. “I'm a creative person, I like to paint, but I just don't have the energy to do that and all I want to do is do ket.”
Eventually, she had to get a bladder biopsy, and although everything was fine, Francesca was prompted to quit for good. Now, she’s engaging with a local drug and alcohol service, doing both group and individual sessions. “I've also got an appointment next week with a hypnotherapist to address some of my previous life experiences and understand the route of it,” she says. Ideally, she would like to go to rehab, but she unfortunately can’t afford it.
Lily, who quit in June after reaching her “wit’s end”, was able to go to rehab and has since begun taking part in a 12-step programme, which she “continues to work every day”.
For those trying to outrun their minds, ketamine provides the perfect destination: oblivion. While those who become addicted to ketamine make up only a tiny proportion of those who use the drug recreationally and therapeutically, both Lily and Francesca show that the descent into addiction can be a slippery one, especially where mental health and trauma come into play, and something that once offered light relief can be the catalyst for chaos.
If you are struggling with addiction or substance abuse issues, you can book an appointment with your GP to discuss diagnosis and treatment. You can call the Frank drugs helpline on 0300 123 6600.
You can find your local GP here.
