“I would never, ever have imagined that this would happen to us as a family,“ said his mother, Deborah Casserly, still grieving for Barney who died in April 2018, aged 21.
The extent of the crisis prompted the government in January to seek advice from an official advisory body on whether to reclassify ketamine as a Class A substance.
In the consulting room of doctor Niall Campbell, a leading specialist in addiction treatment at Priory Hospital, Roehampton, Casserly, 64, showed pictures of her son -- a smiling young man with dark hair and bright eyes.
Barney was just 16 when he went to the Reading music festival in southern England and used ketamine for the first time, writing about it in ecstatic terms in his journal.
- ‘Excruciating pain’ -
His family sent him to private rehabs but he relapsed, would use every day, and was in an “excruciating amount of pain”.
Barney suffered from ulcerative cystitis, also known as “ketamine bladder”, which is when “the breakdown products of ketamine basically cause the bladder to rot”, said Campbell.
An anaesthetic drug invented in 1962, ketamine is used for both human and veterinary medicine often as a horse tranquilliser.
Users “go right down into what we call a K hole, which is just to the point of collapsing and being unconscious”.
And among young people aged 16-24 “the misuse of ketamine... has grown in the last decade” by 231 percent, said junior interior minister Diana Johnson, in her letter asking for advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
- Highly addictive -
“It’s a cheap drug with a strong effect on people and people aren’t concerned about selling it to youngsters,“ added Laiden.
“This epidemic is having a huge effect on the nation,“ said Campbell.
But others argue that ketamine can have healing benefits.
“We want people to see what the healing benefits of ketamine, when it’s controlled in the right way, can do,“ said Lucy da Silva.
But she agreed there was “a need for education around the dangers of street ketamine and the lives that it’s taking”.
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