DOSE:

-999.0 g

Ketamine

(daily)

My mother had inquired at what age I had started taking Ketamine. 'Around fourteen' I replied hesitantly. The game was up. Without even noticing it, the last four years of my life had spiralled out of control. From elitist British boarding school, to squat life, habitual drug use and police encounters. Now I was sitting next to my mum in a doctors waiting room in Gibraltar awaiting the results of my Hepatitus and HIV test.

I found myself mulling the question over quite intensely in my head-when did it all start?

When I was fourteen, in the holidays, I would come back to my home in London where my parents took care of me (to a certain extent). I had just recently lost my class-A virginity on a couple of pills, and entered the whirlwind exitement of unbridled curiousity and taboo breaking maniacy that I'm pretty sure every drug muncher has at one point experienced. The guy who I had been buying pills off was a friends older brother. He was a squatter who came back to visit his brother regularly.

It was a hot day in July. School had just broken up for the summer, and I was ready for the insanity this liberty would provide. Going over to my mates flat in Baker Street, armed with £40 in crisp notes, I prepared myself for a solid night of pills. Anyway, no pills that night, but loads of this strange white powder. K.

To cut a long story short, I liked this stuff. I mean I REALLY liked this stuff. It was cheap, easy (anywhere,anytime), and I do have to say, it made me look 'cool' infront of my public school peers, who were not even smoking grass at the time. At this time I must confess I bullied a few peple into taking K, who I later found had developed a dependancy such as mine. The year after I left school at an illegal age (before I even had baseline qualifications) to embark in a career of domestic aneathatising. After a while, Ketamine led me to a group of people (met at dealers house) where we instantly realised we all had something in common.

For a year and a half we purchased a quarter litre (12.5g) of the stuff every two days which we consumed in large lines. The average line was a half gram, any less and the subject would be labelled a pussy. I remember (or rather dont remember) on one occassion taking a dare from a friend to snort a gram line up each nostril simulaneously. I did it, but had to swallow most down the back of my throat to make space for the lot. All this seemed perfectly normal daily practice as there was no outside input of reality into our closely packed group.

Throughout bieng seventeen, I think I only spent approx. 30 days sober. My parents had long since moved to Spain and knew very little of my activities. The occassional mediocre phonecall was not to uncover sensitive info, such as I was living in a grimy squat in north London, or the K habit I had aquired. They didnt even know what K was untill I told them.

As I turned eighteen, I, asweel as the rest of us, began to feel a deep sense of unsatisfaction with the effects of the drug, so we reached a logical conclusion. I still cant believe how easy it was. Within an hour of the intial idea being mentioned, we had found a needle exchange and were embarking on some amateur accupuncture. We started off using 2.5ml diabetic syringes, jabbed straight into the arm (intra-muscular). I feel it hard, even now, to talk about or even think about what happened for the three months after. My girlfriend left me, I was involved in a hit and run incident, and one of my best friends was tested positive for HIV, the only viable reason for this was that he had been sharing needles in the squats. The worst thing was that amidst all this, we continued.

My moment of realisation occured whilst on my own on a train from London to Slough at 12:30pm. I began the usual ritual of preparation with the whopping 10ml syringes I had started to use (believe me - you should see these damn things- nucleur missiles we named them),and then dropped it on the toilet floor.So desperate for my fix, I fumbled frantically for it on the germ infested ground and plunged it into my arm before my mind could intervene with any uneccessary reason. Just as I was about halfway through my 7.5ml dosage, the train jerked forward and the needle ripped violently sideways from my arm. I looked up at the mirror ahead of me. I assed the situation. I was on my own, in a public toilet, jacking up animal tranquilisers, sticking a syringe the size of a hot dog into a bleeding, abcess speckeled arm. I dont know if it was the K that did this to me, but for half an hour I stared into that mirror, blood flowing down my left arm, and started to cry. Not out of pain, but out of realisation. I attended some of the finest schools in Europe as a child, was always top of my class. Now I was a junkie, a total addict (and to anyone that says K is not addictive- try taking six grams a day for half a year). I had no exams, my friend was dying, and I felt a total wreck. That was the lowest point of my life.

That night I called my parents in Spain who had not spoken to me for almost half a year and demanded they bought me over.

Which brings me to the start. Imagine how hard it is to sit with your own mother while a doctor reads out the results of a needle infected HIV and Hepatitus test. My friend died in hospital about three weeks ago. None of us were allowed to see him or find out his condition because his family totaly stonewalled us. They had no problem in telling us he was dead though when it happened.

My advice to others who wish to try K or are current users is keep it controlled. Through its mentally twisting effects, you may easily forget how much you've had and decide to polish off another gram before fully off the last. The other piece of advice I have comes right from the heart. I don’t think that a single shot will appease your curiosity for the process, I know of no-one who has ever done it once. Its just too easy. After doing between three and thirty needles a day for three months, I firmly believe that I have suffered some form of mental damage. I cant concentrate, I have paranoia of stupid things (devil in my cupboard was an entertaining example), my emotions are out of control, and above all, I just dont think Im as fun as I used to be. I still suffer all these anxieties after four months clean and I think that I will suffer them for many years to come. Now I have come to terms with it as the psychological burden I must bear for the crimes I have inflicted on myself and others and I will never forget the day I was told my friend was dead.

I dont mean to preach, but please kids, play it safe - you'll end up playing longer.

Oh yeah - the test:

Hepatitus B)
Hepatitus C) NEGATIVE
HIV )

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 6312
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Feb 19, 2002	Views: 30,236
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Ketamine (31) : Various (28), Addiction & Habituation (10), Retrospective / Summary (11)