University students are strikingly vulnerable to dying from the horse tranquilliser. Yet an activist group is intent on softening college drugs policies
Universities are softening their drug policies after pressure from a student activist group amid a surge in deaths from ketamine.
Higher education leaders are reducing punishments for drug use while promoting “harm reduction” such as urging students to take substances with friends so someone can call an ambulance.
Students are being offered free drug-checking kits for ketamine, MDMA and cocaine by their union along with a 5 per cent discount for kits to check LSD.
The lenient stance comes as figures prepared for The Times show that ketamine, a horse tranquilliser, is Britain’s hidden campus killer, implicated in the deaths of 41 students.
Ketamine attracts students as it is half the price of cocaine; a single dose costs about £3. It has had a reputation for being relatively safe.
The revolution in universities’ attitudes has been guided by Students for Sensible Drug Policy UK (SSDP), a lobbying group created to campaign for the decriminalisation and regulation of drugs, which has gained positions of influence.
A board member of SSDP, Hanna Head, has been made chairwoman of the official student advisory panel working on a new common drugs strategy for Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, due to be launched on Thursday.
Priti Patel, the former home secretary and an architect of Britain’s ten-year drug strategy, accused university leadership of being penetrated by “a lobbying organisation with access to the highest level” and urged ministers to intervene.
“This should be investigated by the government if Universities UK is engaging with a group that has a vested interest,” she said.
“This is an absolute disgrace and poses a lot of questions on what’s going on in our universities. Any parent would be very worried about sending their youngster to university if there is going to be an acceptance that students are going to take drugs.
“It goes against all the work and investment that has gone into policing and cracking down on county lines drug gangs.
“University vice-chancellors and universities themselves are going to be the ones with blood on their hands to a certain extent with the number of murders that take place with regard to drug crimes.”
Universities UK said: “The taskforce’s report . . . will not be condoning the use of drugs or supporting decriminalisation, but will be developing a proactive and consistent approach to student safety and health. Our priority is to see students succeed, and drug use can harm their wellbeing, education and future careers.”
Hanna Head, a board member of SSDP, is chairwoman of the official student advisory panel working on a new common drugs strategy for Universities UK
The University of Manchester has dropped its “zero tolerance” policy of random drug checks using dogs and expelling students from halls to adopt a “harm-reduction approach” in response to campaigning by SSDP. The students’ union offers drug-testing kits.
Keele University and the University of the West of England, Bristol, have rebuilt their disciplinary procedures to include a greater emphasis on support. Sanctions may involve referrals to wellbeing services, warnings and acceptable behaviour contracts.
The University of Bristol has swapped zero-tolerance for harm reduction. Students have been offered free drug-testing kits.
SSDP’s successes include being brought in to advise a charity helping universities move away from a punitive approach to drug use.
A former board member of SSDP became a top officer at the National Union of Students and launched a drug survey finding widespread use, which is cited as evidence to support reform.
SSDP said it recognises that students take drugs and hopes to reduce the related harms.
SSDP sources say its local chapters may raise money in line with university or student-union rules. The British organisation belongs to SSDP International but gets no financial support from the overseas group, which is based in Vienna. The US-based SSDP Foundation, which previously ran the Vienna branch, has an annual income of $770,000.
Daniel Mervis, 23, died of a drug overdose at a dealer’s flat in 2019 after becoming addicted to cocaine. Students were aware of his drug abuse but “zero tolerance” meant no one alerted Oxford University for help, according to his father, Hilton.
The student “denied his drug use out of fear of the ‘severe’ consequences prescribed by a policy that had its roots in ‘zero tolerance’ rather than welfare”, his father said.
Jeni Larmour died on her first night at Newcastle University
One of the most prominent victims of ketamine was Jeni Larmour, 18, who died in university accommodation on her first night at Newcastle University in 2020.
Police found three types of Class A and B drugs in the bedroom of Kavir Kalliecharan, a fellow student who used the horse medication with her.
Newcastle has been a pioneering university in softening drug policy, ending automatic evictions of students caught with drugs in halls in response to a campaign by the local SSDP branch. Its student union offers the free and discounted drug-checking kits.
Newcastle University said that when students have drugs it always takes action, ranging from support, safeguarding, disciplining and expelling from halls or university to informing police, which may result in prosecution.
The rise in use and harm from ketamine happened around the same time as universities began softening their drug policies but the events are unrelated. Supporters of drug liberalisation observe that the increase in ketamine use followed the government’s repressive approach in 2014 to upgrade it to a Class B controlled drug and increase penalties for its possession. SSDP is campaigning for reforms to reduce harm from all drugs and it neither condemns nor condones drug use.
Ketamine is used by partygoers seeking euphoria, altered senses and stress release. Users’ bladder and kidneys can be damaged. Some users describe a frightening experience known as a “K-hole” when mind and body seem separated and the power of movement is lost. One dose can kill, especially when mixed with other substances including alcohol.
Students are strikingly vulnerable to being killed by ketamine, according to records collected by the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths at St George’s Hospital in south London, which compiled statistics for The Times. Nearly one in ten people killed by illicit ketamine is a student, yet among deaths from all drugs they make up less than one in 50 victims. Young users are at heightened risk; most victims killed by ketamine never reach their thirties. The median age of death from ketamine is 29, while for all drug deaths it is 39.
The sudden grip of the horse powder on campus is exposed by the mortality figures, which cover England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
In 2012 no student died with ketamine in their system and only seven had ever done so since records began in 1999.
Ketamine was then implicated in student deaths every year from 2013. Deaths peaked at seven in 2017 and in 2021, the latest year for which numbers are available. Because of a time lag in reporting, compilers project there will have been a record nine ketamine-related deaths in 2021.
Universities are a gateway to ketamine. A study of students in Ireland asking how old they were when they began taking various drugs found ketamine was the one most typically started between the ages of 19 and 21.
An article for the student newspaper The Tab states: “Before coming to university, many students may not know a great deal about ketamine . . . all that changes, though, when you walk through those doors as a silly little fresher.”
A still from a “harm reduction” video produced by the University of the West of England in Bristol
At music festivals, ketamine accounts for a quarter of all drug seizures, according to figures provided to The Times by Tictac, which analyses illegal drugs at St George’s.
Ketamine is sweeping young Britain. Students say they are more likely to use it than any drug except cannabis. The proportion of 16-24 year olds who have used ketamine is a record 5.8 per cent, nearly treble the rate 15 years ago.
Ketamine causes more health damage than any other clubbing drug with a record surge of new cases resulting in more than 2,000 patients now in NHS treatment.
Trevor Shine, the director of Tictac, suggested young people may “feel it’s a safer drug because you don’t hear as much about deaths from ketamine.”
How ketamine affects users
“I felt like I wanted to move away but I was unable to move away. It was frightening. I didn’t like it.” This clubber, a cocaine user, tried ketamine once and never again. His experience is strikingly similar to that of the main group of ketamine users: horses (Dominic Kennedy writes).
Ketamine is a sedative to prepare horses for surgery. “You can’t tell a horse to lie down. It’s not a dog,” Fred Barrelet, a competition horse vet who has officiated at the Olympics, said.
A horse is put into a padded room to receive the drug. “It loses control of its muscles. It loses control of co-ordination. It is fully conscious while this happens,” Barrelet, who is based at Newmarket, said. “How the horse perceives this loss of control is difficult to say. If you take away its power to control its muscles I can’t imagine that would be a particularly pleasant event.”
The horse’s ordeal resembles a notorious effect the drug sometimes has on humans, known as a “K-hole”, when users cannot voluntarily move and may feel they are having an out-of-body experience.
Ketamine, also known as “ket”, “K” or “special K”, is a dissociative drug detaching users from reality. There were fewer than five deaths a year involving recreational use of ketamine in England between 1997 and 2005 but there has been an explosion in fatalities, which now run at about 30 a year according to the largest ever study, led by John Corkery, a former Home Office researcher.
He found typical users were male, single, aged 20-24, unemployed or studying and from Chinese or mixed race backgrounds.
Corkery was on a working group contributing to government advice before ministers upgraded ketamine to a Class B drug in 2014, increasing maximum penalties for possession to five years in prison rather than two.
The dangers of taking ketamine include anxiety, hallucinations, panic attacks and memory impairment. Breathing and heart function can be fatally affected, particularly when taken with alcohol and other drugs — although users have died after taking ketamine alone. Bladder disease may lead to the organ’s removal. Heavy use can damage the urinary tract and kidneys.
Seizures of ketamine at the border have increased by over 300 per cent in a year, up from 37kg to 154kg. Lucy Moreton of the Immigration Services Union said ketamine was being targeted, based on intelligence, with extra training and testing. Border officers frequently intercept the drug in overseas post.
The United Nations and World Health Organisation have resisted China’s requests to reduce diversion and illicit trafficking of ketamine by making it an internationally controlled drug. Opponents of a global clampdown argue that it is needed for emergency medicine and children’s anaesthesia.
The number of adults in Britain entering NHS treatment for ketamine rose 27 per cent in a year. The total is now 3.5 times higher than it was six years earlier.
Source: The Times
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