I had a fun moment with a girl a few weeks ago. She was a friend of a friend and we met at a restaurant to celebrate her departure back to the UK. She spoke with a rich pommy accent, wore her hair in a stylish quiff, had bold make-up applied to her cheery visage and wore an ironically formal blue velvet dress. She was a stunner. What impressed me even more than her arresting appearance and sultry speech was that she was a really fun person. We had these party toys with us that looked like a smoking pipe that you blew through which made a small ball float in the air. Her and I had one pipe each and we developed a game of trying to shoot the ball to each other and catching it. Though we never succeeded in our aim, it did provide a unique opportunity to do something that society doesn’t normally offer up. To look dead into the eyes of a near stranger for an extended period of time. Right now I can still visualise her gleaming eyes and the plastic pipe hanging out of her cheeky grin.

I didn’t think I’d ever hear of her again, but I did. She’d taken K at a party and drowned in a bath.

K, or Ketamine as it is formally known, was developed as an anesthetic for US soldiers in the Vietnam war and is still used in developing countries in battlefield conditions. It is also used in some circumstances in emergency operations where there isn’t sufficient ventilation. More commonly, Ketamine is used by veterinarians when operating on dogs, cats or horses. Since the late 60s it has been  smoked, injected or taken orally as a recreational drug and in the last ten years its use has risen sharply in Australia at rave and night club scenes. Short-term effects involve out of body experiences, numbness, loss of sensory perceptions, hyper-salvation, disorientation, hallucination and inability to feel pain. Longer-term effects can result in irreversible bladder damage, insomnia and memory loss. The peak high experienced by a user is called a K hole where the mind appears to be isolated and the body is virtually paralysed. For this reason Ketamine is sometimes used as a date rape drug as the paralysis can last for up to an hour. Most Ketamine related deaths occur when the user is in this state and often involves bodies of water.

I didn’t know this girl all that well but I’m quite sure she didn’t intend to drown in a bath that night, and I’d feel very confident betting that if she were in a rational state of mind then she’d still be with us. I’m sure she probably knew the risks involved in using Ketamine before she took it, and possibly even knew about the dangers of drowning. In a rational state of mind it would seem pretty easy to avoid a tragic situation like that but she wasn’t in a rational state of mind when it happened. Mind altering drugs take away reason and common sense and the results can be tragic. By putting herself in a position where she was not in complete control of her body she paid the ultimate price.

What a waste.

It seems simple, but it’s important to think about what you are going to do before drinking, smoking or injecting a mind-altering substance – and know that you might not be able to afterwards.