According to a leading addiction psychiatrist, youth addiction to ketamine is a national problem and growing rapidly.
Specialist ketamine clinics have recorded a rise in the number of young people coming through their doors over the past two years, many of whom struggle to attend mainstream treatment. NHS and private clinics have also reported significant increases.
Owen Bowden-Jones, a psychiatrist and founder of the groundbreaking Club Drug clinic, said he had seen a marked increase among young people after “a significant surge” in the popularity of ketamine made the drug a national problem.
“I feel like the vast majority are using it to self-medicate for emotional distress. That would suggest to me that they have found a pharmacological shortcut to managing their mental health,” he said, adding that this could indicate difficulties in accessing mental health care.
The number of people seeking treatment for ketamine addiction through NHS drug and alcohol services has doubled from 1,140 to 2,211 between 2019 and 2023, the highest number ever. recent data shows. The share of young people The percentage of people receiving substance abuse treatment for ketamine has increased from less than 1% in 2015 to 6% in 2023.
Private clinics have also reported increases. The Priory has recorded increases, while UK Addiction Treatment said ketamine admissions had doubled from 198 in 2020 to 397 in 2023. Rehabs UK, which works with treatment clinics, received 4,000 requests in 2023, with ketamine accounting for 30% so far in 2024, up from 15% in 2023.
A new group of patients Bowden-Jones has been observing are young people who have experienced trauma through the use of ketamine, because its dissociative quality makes it a “brilliant emotional numbing agent” and because there is a “lack of good trauma therapy available”.
This was Pagan’s experience. She started taking ketamine for fun with friends, then started using it alone “just to block everything out.” She soon found that “you let other emotions override you, so you keep using more.” This escalated to injecting, and within a year she was seriously ill, she said.
She has life-changing health issues, including liver disease and nerve damage that makes it difficult to walk on one of her legs. “Nobody told me how much pain you would feel,” she said.
Bowden-Jones has also noticed a recent increase in people injecting rather than snorting. “It’s also more harmful if you inject it, like any drug.”
Bowden-Jones set up his clinic after noticing a growing number of younger people coming in with drug addictions that were not being helped by mainstream NHS services, which mainly cater for older heroin and crack cocaine users.
“Young people are using drugs other than what our services are experts in,” he said. “A lot of young people wouldn’t think of using heroin, it’s clear to them that it’s a very dangerous, very addictive drug to start with, and yet they’re coming to me with two to three grams of ketamine a day.”
He believes drug treatment centres need to adapt and work more closely with mental health services, and reverse a structure where they are “funded separately and don’t communicate well”, leaving people “in a systemic gap”. Without this support, patients become “very stressed and vulnerable and they revert to ketamine”.
Ketamine has been around for a long time, starting in the rave scene of the ’90s, DrugWise CEO Harry Shapiro said, but the surge in people seeking help for addiction is recent. “I think part of it is probably a result of COVID,” he said, adding that it’s “hard to be young these days.”
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“I never thought of it as a party drug, like people do at festivals. It’s a very isolating drug.”
Other specialist ketamine clinics, including Turning Point and a clinic in Bexley run by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, have reported more young patients in the past three years.
Dr Irene Guerrini set up her clinic in Bexley in 2022 after noticing a “very unusual” increase in young people with ketamine addictions that were making them “medically seriously ill”, finding that 7.8% of patients overall had problems with the drug.
The clinic offers peer support and specialist staff, and works closely with mental health professionals and urologists, as the drug can cause serious bladder problems. It is now being replicated in other trusts in Greater London, with Guerrini sharing best practice with clinicians in other regions.
Dr Mohammed Belal, a urologist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, said he has seen an explosion in bladder cancer cases involving ketamine since 2019 and this is spreading across the country.
Ketamine addicts respond well to treatment, but rolling out specialist services is a challenge, says Dr Emily Finch, a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ addiction division.
There is a shortage of psychiatrists for addictions and funding is “particularly low and risky,” she said, making it difficult to innovate, partly because addiction is a Cinderella service because of “a misconception that it is people’s fault.”