Inside the Ketamine Crisis – That Young Women Are Struggling With

(Cosmopolitan) She holds on to herself, tightly, leaning slightly forward, her arms wrapped around her lower body. Spidery lashes line her doe eyes, which meet mine as she talks, slowly and quietly, with long pauses between each sentence. It’s like her words and her memories are falling out of her head, lost somewhere, with little chance of grabbing them back.

She is dressed in a baby-blue matching tracksuit set, has sliders on her feet, and her handbag – which had to be carried in for her – sits nearby. A diamante belly ring pokes out from the top of her joggers. She’s rail-thin; fragile in a way that extends beyond the physical. I fear my questions – questions pulling her into her past – will shatter her.

We don’t have much time to talk, as Kim* needs to go to the toilet every two minutes. When she does go, she tells me, a jelly-like substance, screamingly painful, leaks out of her. Her bladder is ravaged and its lining is shedding – just one of the side-effects of ketamine. The drug, she says in her soft Scouse accent, has "stripped me of everything." Her life is no longer her own. She is 23 years old.

*Names have been changed

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