Latin, algebra, MDMA... for today’s gilded generation, drugs
are the new normal. Francesca Carington meets the high-flyersof tomorrow who are getting a truly Class A educationTom* is a shaggy-haired
17-year-old who goes
to a well-known liberal
boarding school. He is
more articulate than
your average teenager;
but like all too many
of his peers, he’s already
knee-deep in narcotics. ‘In the last year, I
haven’t been on a night out or even to a
friend’s house where there hasn’t been a person
taking drugs. Every single time I go out some-
one will have drugs or will have taken drugs,
or someone will be offering them. It just happens,’
he says matter-of-factly, over coffee in the
Royal Borough. He started taking MDMA
when he was 14, and moved on to ketamine
soon after, which he’s scaled back since he was
diagnosed with depression a couple of months
ago. (The horse tranquilliser is one of the most
popular drugs among teenagers.) He’ll be put
on medication soon, when the drug use will
need to stop, ‘which will be a blessing in disguise,’
he says. ‘Though, whenever I get drunk it’s
very hard to resist if everyone’s taken the same
drug and you haven’t. You can’t have the same
night if you haven’t taken it.’
Meet Tatler’s Gen-Z, Class A students.
They’re a complicated bunch. They’re ( mostly)
smart; they often struggle with poor mental
health; they started young (aged 13 or 14) –
and have no plans to give up any time soon. Of
course, a lot of teenagers don’t take drugs. But a
lot of them do, particularly when they’re
privileged – with either a good pot of cash to
spend on drugs themselves or rich friends who
don’t want to be using alone. And while teenage
drug use is nothing new, what is striking – indeed
radically different to times past – is just how
run-of-the-mill, how ordinary, it is for this
group of adolescents. ‘It’s just so normal,’ saysone, ‘for us to be doing drugs. We all do them.’
Gone are the days of charmingly innocent
14-year-olds at an all-girls boarding school
doing poppers in the kitchen (true story – and
one that kept us entertained in my last year at
school less than 10 years ago). Now, every exeat
is one big MDMA-, ketamine- or coke-fuelled
adventure, depending on your vice of choice.
Weed and hash remain as popular as ever,
while downers such as Xanax and Valium are
very much on the rise. And that’s not to mention
the tiny silver NOS canisters that litter the
streets every Sunday morning, or study drugs
like Ritalin and Adderall, or the worrying creep
of opioids onto the scene, be it a Percocet at a
party, or cocaine cut with fentanyl.
Then there are the festival drugs: GHB, 2C-B,
acid, shrooms and ‘dizz’ (a form of MDMA).
Tom remembers going to Wilderness last
summer: ‘I don’t think there were 10 minutes
on that whole trip where one person was sober- and it wasn’t from drinking.’ As for Emily, a
17-year-old at a co-ed boarding school, she
reckons that up to 90 per cent of her friends
take drugs. Chloe, a 19-year-old ex-pupil of a
prestigious London all-girls day school, tells
me about one friend who used to take MDMA
before his least favourite lesson ‘so it would be
more fun.’ Another 17-year-old girl says she
knows people who take cocaine every single
day, even at school. Tom says he arrived at a
party the other day and was approached by a
girl with a rolled-up £50 note and offered
some lines before he’d even taken his coat off.
A mother describes her horror at discovering
that her 16-year-old daughter had been using
since she was 12 – which, her other daughter
assured her, is not at all unusual.
And that’s what’s terrifying parents: the
burgeoning number of their children sent to
rehabs, boot camps – or worse. Nationwide,
doctors are noting a rising phenomenon that’s
filling up beds on teenage mental-health
wards: drug-induced psychosis. As Lord
Monson, a grieving father turned activist, puts
it over the phone from Spain, it’s never a case
of cocaine- or ketamine- induced psychosis –
‘the stuff that gets into your brain and marks
you for life, that is always skunk.’ His son, Rupert,
suffered psychotic episodes after smoking the
super-strength cannabis; and in January 2017,
took his own life. The growing, elastic teenage
brain is especially vulnerable when it comes to
skunk; an international study published this
year in The Lancet found that daily use of high-
potency cannabis (with a THC content of
more than 10 per cent) increased the risk of
psychosis five-fold. They calculated that if
skunk were no longer available, 30 per cent of
cases of first-episode psychosis in London
could be prevented.
Skunk is ubiquitous – it’s mentioned by every
teenager I speak to. Old- fashioned cannabis
(which can rarely be found these days anyway)
had a THC content of 1-2 per cent; in skunk,
it’s on average 14 per cent. And tests on police
seizures show that 94 per cent of cannabis in
London is skunk. As Monson says, ‘in a literal
way cannabis is skunk.’ He is advocating for the
legalisation of cannabis, so that its strength can
be properly regulated. ‘I believe that every
school, every term, should be reminding people,
coming up with cautionary stories about young
men like Rupert. Rupert had it all. He was a
good-looking boy, he was athletic, he got three
good A-Levels in sciences, he was an arts scholar.
People thought, “Wow, this boy has got so
much going for him”, and then he dissolved
into this psychotic wreck. It was just awful.’
Awful, but today’s teenagers show no sign of
stopping. The patterns are hard to pin down,
as drug use differs between schools and social
groups, and every teenager has a different take
on it. One day-school girl says it’s worse at
boarding schools; one boarding-school student
says the same of London day schools. I’m told
people at boarding schools are way more
experienced, then that they’re very naïve. One
teenager says coke is for academic kids and
ketamine is for arty sorts; one says boys goTatler September 2019 tatler.comWasted youthPHOTOGRAPH: MICHAEL HAUPTMAN/TRUNK ARCHIVE.*NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED09-19WELL-Drugs.indd 108 03/07/2019 16:25
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