Primary school children using party drug ketamine during lunch breaks - as teenagers facing life in nappies

Others are using it to manage mental health struggles unaware of the risk they could spend a life in nappies because of the devastating physical consequences.

Experts are warning the so-called ‘party drug’, currently a Class B substance, is so cheap and easy to access that it’s become as affordable as a ‘meal deal’.

Alan Walsh, a youth worker in Liverpool, told LBC: “They can use their pocket money, it’s such a cheap drug. Have a Maccies or a bump of Ket, the choice is there for you.

"There are drug dealers on every corner with very little morals.

“These are children we are seeing, aged ten, eleven, twelve-years old”, he added: “I’ve never known a drug so dirty, so cheap and so damaging.

“This is the heroin of the 80s, it’s probably the worst drug I’ve ever seen in my 30-year career, the stuff it’s doing to these young people. I’ve worked with a couple of drug dealers over the last few months who’ve stopped selling it because they realise the damage it’s doing to young people.”

Rob Durrans runs a support group in Liverpool specifically for people affected by ketamine abuse, he said: “It is in schools, nine and ten-year-olds. When you have a bump of Ket it takes about 40 minutes to wear off, so when dinner time comes up they’re having a bump in school and they know by the time they go back into class it’s worn off. How scary is that, thinking it’s normal, it’s part of your lunch.”

The physical impact of sustained ketamine abuse is something Rob is seeing on a frequent basis at his drop-in sessions.

“The ages are getting younger and younger”, he told LBC.

“People are coming in with nappies on, sobbing and crying and don’t want to live. These kids are really young, crying in pain, and their parents are like ‘What do we do?’.

For many young people, the physical damage is being misinterpreted as urinary tract infections or ‘growing pains’.

Rob said: “You get “Ket cramps”, you start urinating out jelly and blood, that’s the wall of the bladder and it can’t be repaired. So, eventually that goes, they have to have it taken away, then it attacks the kidneys and the liver, and then they die.”

He added: “To see it first hand is devastating. You’ve got kids isolating because they are ashamed. They can’t sit on wooden chairs because they need couches, they need to go to the toilet every five minutes because their bladder can’t hold enough water – they’ve got nappies on and they feel embarrassed.”

There is danger beyond the physical damage though with young people ending up in so-called ‘Ket-holes’. Rob said: “You’ve got a 14 or 15-year-old kid completely unconscious, they’re not safe. They’re out of it, they’ll collapse and they could die – not just from the drug, but the environment they’re in.”

Meanwhile, tests show the drug is often cut with other dangerous substances, he said: “We test it… there’s traces of fentanyl, heroin, tramadol, prescription tablets… it can kill you instantly.

"We mention it, but it doesn’t stop them using.”

As part of this investigation, LBC has been to visit the UK’s first dedicated Ketamine clinic for Under 16s, opened at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in response to the growing concern on Merseyside.

Professor Rachel Isba is a consultant in paediatric public health medicine and is running the clinic, she told LBC: “In the North West and particularly in bits of Merseyside, it's super cheap, and so we're collectively hearing stories about young people pooling their pocket money, and they're not using it as a party drug, they're not just using it on the weekends, they use it in school.”

She added: “Some of them are already starting to get physical complications from their Ket use, which I think sets it apart from lots of other drugs that young people might experiment with, and that's really concerning. I can't think of another drug that affects you in such a profound way so soon into using it.

“If you've got bladder damage and you've peed the lining of your bladder, or you have to go to the toilet every 20 minutes or you're peeing blood, that's terrifying, and I think when you're young, you think you're invincible, and this drug is definitely showing us that that is not the case."

A study by the Home Office Waste Water Analysis Programme has found levels of ketamine have almost doubled in the last twelve month period.

Delamere, an addiction rehab clinic in Cheshire has seen a huge rise in terms of the prevalence of ketamine use, and three times the number of admissions compared to 2024.

Speaking anonymously to LBC, a young woman who received treatment there revealed the horrific state it left her in.

“My urologist said to me that cocaine ruined the inside of your head and sends you crazy, but ketamine just destroys your body”, she said.

“My bladder was absolutely ruined.

“I used to wee anywhere and everywhere. I worked 18 minutes away from my house and I would have to pull over three times on the way home to have a wee at the side of the road. It was to the point where in the night I would get up and wee into a bucket at the side of my bed because I was in that much pain.

‘I lost a lot of weight, which is the toxic thing, because as a female today, weight loss is a positive thing, or it's seen as a positive thing. I glamorised it. I know a lot of other young females glamorise it. You kind of feel like you almost look your best when you're dying on the inside, if that makes sense.

“I wouldn't eat. I was in pain all the time. I had headaches, I spent a good couple of years where most of my time I was just scrunched in a ball in the toilet, sat next to the toilet, waiting for the pain to go, waiting to have a wee. It just destroys you.

“I was just dying and my body was starting to fail. If I hadn’t gone to rehab I would not be here today, I would 100% be dead.”

A common theme emerging from the people we spoke to is that Ketamine is used as a dissociative drug – something to help young people forget their troubles.

Abby, a recovering addict from Manchester, told LBC how she turned to the drug to manage anxiety and mental health issues because she didn’t feel there were better options, she said:

“I was 16 when I started taking it. Ketamine did what I wanted a substance to do; to escape from things and to sort of self-medicate.

“For me, it was the struggle to access mental health support. I had struggled with that my entire life, so I ended up using to cope, and then by the time I reached back out to mental health services, I was told that I couldn't start any sort of treatment until I got off ketamine, which leaves you in a bit of a catch 22 because the substance abuse services are saying you've got an underlying mental health problem that needs sorting out for you to be able to be successfully clean for a period of time.

“I think eventually I just gave up. I lost faith in myself to get myself out of it and the services weren't there to help. It was survival for me, it was trying to keep myself alive.”

But the Ketamine use took its toll, she added: “It was completely debilitating.

“I couldn't live a normal life at all. It got to the point where I was sleeping in the shower. The pain from the cramps is the most unfathomable pain. I was burning myself with hot water bottles. I had second degree burns just to try and reduce the pain. I could barely walk and I wasn't showering. I couldn't eat properly because it would sort of set the pain off. Every sort of basic need couldn't be met because of my use.

“I would put using above everything. The only thing that I did manage to find the strength to do was to, to go to a car and meet someone and pick up and then it was just back into bed.”

Harry Sumnall is an expert in tackling drug harms at Liverpool John Moores University, and sits on the UK Government Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, he has told LBC the government has missed an opportunity to tackle this issue proactively, he said:

“Looking at some government data around treatment presentations, we know that more and more young people and young adults seeking treatment support, and this is a real shame, because when the Government reclassified ketamine from a Class C drug to a Class B drug in 2014, there was recommendations at the time that we needed additional support and services. It shouldn't just be a change in law.

“That didn't happen at the time, so I think we're seeing some of the consequences now of we've got great drug services, we've got great NHS services, but to a large extent, they're playing catch up. So rather than having early intervention and education interventions, we're seeing people who've been using for a prolonged period of time and perhaps experiencing more serious problems.”

Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Department of Health, Ashley Dalton, told LBC: “We've put an additional 310 million into drug awareness treatment to fund drug treatment, and we're also looking at exploring some improved guidance and information, particularly around ketamine and helping young people in particular be more aware of what drug harms are, and what the harms are of using ketamine, because perhaps they aren't as well-known as they need to be.

“We are also making sure that they've got mental health support in every school in the country. We're recruiting eight and a half thousand new mental health support workers so that we can start to tackle maybe some of those underlying things that might mean that people are more likely to use drugs. So, we want to make sure that we're moving away from treatment towards prevention as well."