Lancashire Ketamine crisis: the 'cheap' Cost-of-Living-Crisis drug destroying the young

Founder of Church on The Street, Pastor Mick Fleming, said the cost-of-living crisis is causing an alarming increase in the amount of young people taking the hallucinogenic drug Ketamine.

The Lancashire charity say they are seeing an influx of young people, between the ages of 16 to 30, in the county becoming addicted to the drug Ketamine, to the point where they are in agony and longer have functioning bladders.

Church on The Street believes Ketamine is becoming the new drug for young people, for reasons including that it is affordable and accessible amidst the Cost-of-Living Crisis and has a hallucinogenic effect that young people use to escape the despair of spiking mental illness.

Pastor Mick said: "The young people I work with are finding it impossible to get off Ketamine. I was with a kid last week who was just 20 years old, and he's written off. He's got everything to live for, but he just cannot stop taking this drug

"When you're trying to come off the drug, you get such overwhelming and horrendous feelings of impending doom and anxiety that it's just too hard to stop. I've had people drive up to Church on The Street and beg me for help and they just say, ‘I can't stop’.

"There's no substitute drug you can take to counteract the effects of withdrawal, either, like methadone for heroin - when you're coming off Ket you have to go through the effects, and it's excruciating. I've seen kids getting into over eight grand of debt with this drug.”

Ketamine is a dissociative drug, which means it acts on different chemicals in the brain to produce visual and auditory distortion, and a detachment from reality. The recreational drug usually comes as a white or off-white powder. It can also be made into pills, or dissolved in a liquid.

Pastor Mick said: "It started to get big during the pandemic, when people weren't able to mix. Ketamine is a cheap drug that helps you escape reality, and now you've got kids at the age of eighteen and they're urinating blood.

"County lines gangs are getting girls hooked on Ketamine and using them for sex. And it's nearly impossible for young people to get rehab, with ten years of cuts to addiction services - especially for something like Ketamine, which isn't considered as life threatening as other drugs. And young people just don't yet have the same years and years of addiction and its chronic, life-threatening effects for rehab facilities to take them, and so they don't get the same support - but if they got it now, it could stop them spiralling into that terrible state".

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