I TRIED KETAMINE for the sake of my children

One mum tells us what happened when she took drugs at her teenage daughter’s party

- SARAH BENSON DAILY MAIL

From the other side of the party, a friend of my daughter’s waves at me. I’m ecstatic to see her. I try to wave back but I can’t move my arm. I stare at it incredulously. ‘Send the message,’ my brain tells me. ‘Pick up your hand and use the levers in your elbow to move it up in the air. Turn your wrist to the right. Spread your fingers. Move your hand from left to right.’

I concentrate hard and, finally, I can wave back – jerkily and a little mechanically but recognisably a wave.

The friend has, of course, long since moved on. The euphoria that had buzzed through my entire body only moments before ebbs and turns into something else entirely. Fear.

This wasn’t how I had expected my experiment with the illegal rave drug to go. Yes, this is me, a 55-year-old mother of three, confessing that at a party at our house hosted by my 19-year-old daughter last month, I took the illegal class B drug ketamine, known on the streets and in clubs as ‘special K’ or ‘vitamin K’.

Why on earth did I do it? I’m not an ageing raver, nor a criminal. I’m much more comfortable watching University Challenge on the sofa with my husband, or gossiping with my similarly menopausal friends about the benefits of Pilates. The answer lies in my long mission to be a good mother. I am trying ketamine for the sake of my kids.

The number of 16- to 24-year-olds taking it has quadrupled in a decade. Given its obvious popularity, I wanted to know what I was dealing with when it came to warning my children, aged 19, 17 and 16, about it.

My policy around drugs has always been to come at it from a point of knowledge. You can call it naive – I think of it as the opposite. I want them to have all the information they need, not from TikTok, not just from ‘boring’ catastrophising in school anti-drug lectures and not solely from their peers, but directly from me.