A schoolboy’s weekend ketamine habit spiralled to the point he was using 11 grams of the powerful dissociative anaesthetic each day.
It got so out of control that Mark’s body began breaking down and he had to keep using the drug to manage the excruciating pain he experienced.
Now 19, he recalled the first moment of trying the drug for a new documentary called Regretamine: Failing Bodies, which tracks the impact of ketamine addiction in the UK.
“It were scary at first. It was a very scary moment,” he said.
“I felt like me hands were going all weird. So, and then I fell asleep at the party because I thought I just need to go to sleep, but realising that was actually my first ever K-hole.”
The next weekend came and instead of spending money on alcohol as usual, the teen from Preston in northern England chose to buy ketamine.
“Because it’s cheaper and I like it more and I wanted more,” Mark said in a video published by journalist Scott Hames.
“So it turned into me getting that, you know, just starting off doing little bumps, little bumps, liking it. And then very quickly it started becoming a everyday thing for me where I was doing it in the school toilets, you know.”
Mr Hames produced Regretatime and interviewed several ketamine addicts and their family members for the documentary.
A former football coach, Mr Hames said he had been shocked at the scale of ketamine addiction in the country and received hundreds of messages from viewers of his videos.
“It’s throughout the entire country,” he told news.com.au.
“I knew there were problems. I didn’t realise there was that much of a problem.
“There’s parents who will message me saying, ‘We’ve lost our daughter, so and now we’ve got the three grandkids that she’s left behind’.”
Mr Hames said he noticed a “theme” of young people with ADHD, like Mark, becoming hooked due to the calming affect it has on their brains.
“It suppresses the thoughts and they feel like they can live with themselves, is another thing they often said,” he said.
In the documentary it is stated 3.8 per cent of 16 to 24 year olds in the UK used ketamine in 2024, a rise of 238 per cent since 2013.
The Australian Institute of Health and Wellbeing’s 2022-2023 National Drug Household Survey also revealed a sharp spike in ketamine use.
It found 300,000 people said they used ketamine in the previous 12 months, a massive increase on the 70,000 from 2016.
Mark began mixing cocaine and ketamine at parties – a concoction nicknamed Calvin Klein – about age 16 before becoming a daily user.
Despite escalating use, Mark thought his habit until he was under control but said it exploded after becoming the victim of alleged sexual abuse.
He said the trauma of the incident, and subsequent police interviews and medical tests, saw him rely more on the drug: “That was the very first day I couldn’t put it down”.
He was using in the school toilets, and then when he dropped out, started taking it at work.
“When the police passed it on to court and the court … decided to drop it (the case) that’s when I turned broken,” he said.
‘I couldn’t go to school no more felt I felt little, felt less than, felt victim.
“I just felt all these horrible feelings where I had to use.”
Mr Hames said speaking with a family who was forced to fund their daughter’s ketamine habit was “very emotional”, as he uncovered the scale of usage.
“They’re all doing mass quantities as well,” he said.
“Mark was 11 grams a day, there was another doing 14 grams.
“And then someone today and reached out who said they did 28 grams in a day, which is an ounce.
“You can’t even get your head around that.”
Mark said he became hooked on K-holes – when people can become mute or unable to move due to too much ketamine – but it became increasingly hard to achieve as his tolerance rose.
“And then very quickly I liked the K-holes. Now I don’t, but I did,” he said.
“I liked the K-holes and I had to use, you know, a big amount to get put in the K-hole because I weren’t sat with myself.
“I weren’t sat with the guilt and it felt like I was a bit free. And then it was taking, you know, because my tolerance went up and I needed to take 11 grams a day to be able to keep on going into a K-hole.
“And there was a point where I just couldn’t care. I would leave me house in a K-hole, just walk out in front of the cars.”
Mark’s addiction saw him drop out of school and cost his job, robbing him of dream of becoming a paramedic.
He couldn’t go without the drug due to bladder infections and kidney stones it caused.
“I couldn’t I couldn’t walk if that ketamine were coming out my system. I couldn’t walk. my pain was shooting through my bladder into my kidneys, my back and it was my pain relief and I got into that horrible cycle.”
Three years later doctors told him “if I carry on using 11 grams a day for three more months, my organ’s going to start failing”.
Mark had been blackmailing his sister not to tell their mother but she couldn’t hide it any longer: “Hated her for it at the time. Now I love her for it.”
He recalled having “jelly” in his urine, not being able to urinate properly and stabbing pains throughout his body.
“I had to wear nappies in my detox because I couldn’t hold my urine,” he said.
Mr Hames said he had seen several people in the grips of ketamine addiction with “tubes hanging out of them” as it destroyed their bodies.
Serious addicts “spend their whole lives in bed” as they become stuck in a cycle of pain and dependence, he said.
“It’s making them urinate constantly, every two minutes,” he said.
“They’re all wearing adult nappies. And it starts with that party scene … and then it leads to them being in bed 24-seven in the bedroom, just doing ketamine and … not eating because it makes them sick.”
Mark was philosophical about his addiction now that he was 100 days sober.
He regrets how his life spiralled out of control, but says he does not regret trying the drug.
“You know, because I don’t regret doing it because obviously I’m a teenager and I experimented, you know, as quite a lot of teenagers do,” he said.
“But I regret thinking that it was normal.”
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