Last week saw yet another coroner's report on a young woman's death by ketamine, the horse tranquilliser widely taken by teenagers as a 'club drug'.

Gemma Weeks, from Axminster in Devon, was 28 when she died in January but first took ketamine at the age of 18. By the end, she was ingesting £500 worth of the drug per week and died from a combination of what the coroner described as 'drug toxicity', urinary bladder necrosis and chronic damage to her kidneys.

Her death follows that of Jeni Larmour, 18, who took a fatal dose of ketamine on her first day at Newcastle University last year, and 20-year-old Sophie Russell, from Lincoln, who also died last autumn having first tried ketamine at 18.

In all three cases, the coroner or a parent has called for ketamine to be re-classified from a Class B to a Class A drug, making its supply punishable by life imprisonment.

And it cannot come a moment too soon. Deaths by ketamine are up by 650 per cent since 2015. Figures reported this year suggest there is one ketamine-related death every week in the UK, with three times as many women losing their lives to it since before the Covid pandemic.

Looking at pictures of Gemma on Facebook – a smiling young woman in her 20s posing with family, one of whom looks like her mother – I am engulfed by sadness.

As a mum of equally smiley children, both in their 20s, my chest tightens at the thought of my daughter having the same end – while I am shocked at how anyone could be taking so much ketamine.

I say 'so much ketamine', because I know how easy it is to take the drug – as I have tried it myself.

Gemma Weeks, 28, was unable to stop taking the class B drug despite the harm and pain it caused

In May 2024, at the age of 55, I tried ketamine at a party thrown by my daughter. It was an experiment, to see how this supposedly 'gentle' Class B drug actually affected one's behaviour and physical responses.

 It was genuinely done in a misguided attempt to be a good parent. I wanted my children – my daughter, who was about to start university, and my son, who was hitting the party scene all too readily – to have all the information they needed, not from TikTok, not just from 'boring' catastrophising in school anti-drug lectures, and not from their peers, but from me.

My aim was to be the person in their lives who told them about the dangers drugs and also all the more relatable social downsides: how it made you behave like an idiot, or caused you to throw up in front of your friends, or dance like a lunatic.

I'd already heard plenty of stories from my nephews. These are London teenagers and they are regularly offered ketamine. They told me of 'ket zombies' at parties, and of DJs getting annoyed with them because they took all the fun out of dancing with their shambling and vacant stares. The way they talked about it, ketamine sounded essentially harmless. Even the 'k-hole' – where you overdo a dose and have hallucinations – sounded not much worse than being drunk.

Before I tried it, I saw it as not innately dangerous, in the same way that driving over the speed limit on an empty motorway at dawn is illegal but not innately dangerous. How naive I was.

For when I tried it myself – the tiniest of 'bumps' given to me by a slightly embarrassed friend of my daughter's – the reality was far worse. The first sensation of the promised out-of-body floatiness was almost immediately superseded by an overpowering panic. Suddenly I was trapped in a body no longer listening to my instructions.

The party dimmed to a feeling of sweaty chill, my heart beating unpleasantly fast, my mind gripped by an overwhelming need to hide somewhere until it was all over. But that urge to move was impossible to execute – I was let down by my body, which had treacherously turned into a robot with the power turned off. 

Oddly my mind remained horribly clear, noting dispassionately the lack of response from my limbs until eventually I organised my unwilling legs into the movements needed to get me out of the party in the kitchen and into our front room, where I leant against the wall – yes, zombie-like – and waited for it to end. The whole nightmare probably only lasted ten minutes, but I remember to this day every horrific second.This wasn't even a 'bad trip'. Nothing had gone wrong. It was just how the drug makes you feel.

And it was only when I talked to a friend of mine who works in A&E that I truly understood how much of a risk I had taken. The horrendous consequences of ketamine use that I soon – guiltily –began to read about in every newspaper didn't always happen as a result of taking too much.

'Sometimes just from the first use you can suffer really terrible effects,' my doctor friend told me.

'The first sensation of the promised out-of-body floatiness was almost immediately superseded by an overpowering panic. Suddenly I was trapped in a body no longer listening to my instructions,' writes Benson

It can cause something called 'ket bladder', where ketamine interferes with the lining of the bladder and makes users permanently need to go to the toilet every 30 minutes or so. It was this that developed into the bladder necrosis and pyelonephritis that helped to kill Gemma Weeks.

Indeed, in a tragic Catch-22, the pain she felt from the condition could only be alleviated by taking ketamine, doing more damage.

But it's not just the danger of very serious urinary problems. 'The trouble with ketamine is that the more often you use it, the more you need to get the same high, but then it's easy to get the new dosage wrong,' said my friend. 'After that initial pinch or 'bump', casual users don't know how bad more can be. Getting just a little amount wrong can tip you into an unresponsive or psychotic state, or a wrongly euphoric state, which can lead users to do stupid things like jump into rivers.'

The Home Office says that illegal use of ketamine has reached record levels in recent years, with an estimated 269,000 using the drug in the year ending March 2024. That surely is an underestimate, since few are going to willing admit it to surveyors.

Ketamine use is especially rife among 16 to 24 year olds, partly because it's cheap (at £20 per gram), partly because it's seen as a 'safe, fun' mood-enhancer without the calamities of the more expensive MDMA or cocaine. Nearly one in ten ketamine casualties, according to records collected by the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths, is a student – compared to the rate of one student in 50 deaths from other drugs.

Our young people are being tempted into ketamine use by its 'soft' classification, its allegedly gentle high and low cost, but find themselves sucked into increasing their use of it by the need to chase the same high.

No one ever thinks 'all the medical stuff' is going to happen to them, in the words of my nephew. But what are the chances Gemma Weeks would have said the same thing before 'big party nights' and the odd bump became an addiction that killed her?

I now know ketamine is no harmless party drug. We need to get the message out that it's a killer not just at the extreme end, but in the hands of those such as Gemma who start taking it for fun. The first step has to be to make it a Class A drug.

Go to a party or go to prison? That should be the price of using ketamine.

•  The author's name has been changed.