Tatler UK - 09.2019

Social media has certainly played a part in

the normalisation of drug use for this genera-

tion. One person who’s spent a lot of time

thinking about how things have changed is

Will, a sober companion working for Porto-

bello Behavioural Health, Notting Hill-based

specialists offering a tailored approach to

recovery and treatment. We meet, squinting

in the sun, in the courtyard of the Royal

Academy, where he describes his work helping

adolescents readjust to life after treatment, or,

as he puts it, ‘soft re-socialising of people in a

whole new way of life.’ Portobello has about

25 to 30 sober companions on its books, and

matches them to each client; Will, a musician

and recovering addict who got clean when he

was 19, works primarily with teenagers, hang-

ing out with them, taking them to gigs,

and keeping them on the straight and narrow.

He’s reluctant to make any sweeping state-

ments about changes in the demographics of

Buying drugs is so easy

with Snapchat. There’s

no faff ing around with

fake IDs and you don’t

even have to meet a dealer

if you don’t want to

increasingly coming across what he calls ‘research

addicts’. ‘When I was a teenager,’ he adds, ‘this

didn’t exist. You didn’t look up drugs, you

didn’t look at what was in them.’ Take skunk,

the dangers of which these drug-smart kids are

all clued up on. Harry’s friends now spend

more money on ‘better quality’ weed shipped

from America. They’ll pay two or three times

the going rate, so an eighth will cost £90-100

(which is more than you’d pay for a gram of

cocaine, which costs £60-80).

Not only are these kids well-educated on

the dangers of drug use, they’ve also all been

there – and take it in their stride. Take Emily,

who talks matter-of-factly of people she knows

having ‘full-on’ heart attacks aged 16 or 17

from coke. ‘They went to hospital and they

were fine. They still do drugs,’ she says. Harry’s

had a friend overdose on MDMA, and he’s

had his own bad trip on 2C-B at a festival. Liv,

a 17-year-old at a London day school, talks

frankly about friends having seizures from taking

too much cocaine, and, even more alarmingly,

about how ‘people know how to deal with it.’

Then there’s ketamine. At £30 a gram,

enough for a night out (and easily what you

might spend on alcohol – which, Harry adds,

takes too long to get you wasted anyway), its

cost is definitely covered by many of these

teenagers’ allowances. Firstly, there are the K-holes,

the dissociative state where you lose awareness

of the world around you: ‘You don’t really know

how much you’ve taken until you’ve done it,’ says

Tom. ‘And you could be absolutely sober or you

could be pulling yourself across the floor. I’ve

had friends who’ve been sexually assaulted,’ he

continues. ‘Especially girls; they become very

unaware of their surroundings, so you do have

to keep an eye on them.’ Ketamine is in fact a

common date-rape drug – one that many young

women are now taking voluntarily.

K-users are certainly aware of the associated

risks. When it comes to the well-documented

bladder problems caused by excessive ketamine

use, Harry says, ‘They just don’t think it will

happen to them. But they know it happens.’

Chloe says the same thing about her friends.

‘It’s almost like saying, “Oh, you get a hangover

if you drink”, but you still drink. It’s the same

thing. They just don’t really connect with the

consequences.’ While a hangover isn’t exactly

comparable to a horse tranquilliser destroying

your bladder, the point still stands: teenagers

never believe that something terrible is going

to happen to them.

But when it does happen to them, what

then? Johan Sorensen, founder of Portobello

Behavioural Health, is the man parents and

schools go to when a child develops a sub-

stance abuse problem; he figures out what pro-

fessional support is needed and puts it in place.

teenage drug use, but says he has noticed a

blurring of lines between ‘serious’ and ‘casual’

drug use. Drugs like heroin, crack cocaine or

crystal meth, he says, have rituals around their

usage that bring a recognition that you have

crossed a line. ‘But when it comes to taking a

pill, you can really separate yourself from any

sort of ritualisation. You’re not cutting up

powder or whatever your ritual entails, so you

can step away from it. It’s not heroin, it’s not

crack cocaine, so they’ve still got that very

firm line in their minds, which is “I do not

have a problem.”’

There’s also the question of legalisation.

Portugal has decriminalised drug offences,

while Canada, Holland and many states in the

US have legalised marijuana. ‘It’s a whole other

conversation,’ says Will. ‘But what it’s done is

removed the fear of stepping into that world.’

Perhaps most significantly, the anxiety around

trying new things has fallen away, thanks in

part to the mountain of information on drugs

available on the internet. Will finds himself

[an arsehole to everyone else. You’re not really

there, you don’t remember who anyone is – I’ve

seen people that haven’t had a good time and

they still do it.’

Xanax may not always be fun, but, at roughly

£1 per pill, it’s certainly cheap – which may

account for another seeming shift in teenage

drug use: the age at which they’re discovering

drugs for the first time. Almost all of the teens

I speak to say they and their friends started

experimenting with drugs at 13 or 14. Which

seems to be a recent change; Harry’s older sister

is 21 and her year group, he says, didn’t start

until they were 17, or even after school. Chloe

echoes this: ‘They’re starting a lot earlier. I know

my friends’ little sisters and little brothers will

be doing drugs at parties when they’re 13, 14,

whereas for us it was 16, 17.’

They’ll usually be introduced to drugs by

older siblings, or by older friends if they’re at

boarding school, who might also deal to them.

Not that they need them to: buying drugs is

incredibly easy. One option is to go shopping

on the dark web, which, once you know how

to do it (and most teenagers do), is as simple

as placing an order on Amazon. It’s cheap and

stress-free (‘You can order 200 pills to your

door for a quarter of the price that you would

get it for on the streets,’ says Tom) and you can

even leave reviews – again, like Amazon. For

those suspicious of the dark web, there are plenty

of other options: a dealer’s phone number

passed down through the year groups; a carte

du jour shouted out of a window as you walk

through London; a takeaway menu with a

card slipped inside; even, as Emily and her

friends have had happen a few times, an offer

from a food-delivery driver as they drop off

your curry.

T

he greatest enabler of all is social

media. ‘It’s just so easy by Snapchat,’

says Harry. The same can be said of

Instagram, but Snapchat is more

common. (Both apps say they

prohibit such activities and that users should

report suspicious content to their safeguarding

teams.) To some, buying drugs these days

doesn’t even feel illegal. There’s no faffing

around with fake IDs and, if you’re using the

dark web, you never even have to meet a dealer if

you don’t want to. And, while money seems not

to be much of an issue to these privately educated

teenagers (the general response to the question of

where their friends are getting hundreds

of pounds to spend on cocaine is: ‘they’re rich’),

social media can help those strapped for cash

too. Some, hungry for drugs, sell their clothes

over Facebook or on the shopping app Depop.

Others, according to parents, will steal to pay for

their pleasures.

Tatler September 2019 tatler.com

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