In Liverpool, a generation of children is encountering a harm that medicine once reserved for adults — bodies broken not by age but by a cheap anaesthetic sold for pocket money. Since May 2025, Alder Hey Hospital's dedicated clinic has received over 100 referrals for ketamine-induced bladder damage, some patients only 13 years old. The drug, sought as a balm for emotional pain, repays that search with physical suffering that can become permanent — and a cruel cycle in which the cure and the cause are the same substance. What is unfolding is less a drug story than a story about what children re
UK doctors warn of ketamine bladder damage in children as young as 13
Children as young as 13 are experiencing severe pain, incontinence, bed-wetting, and potential kidney failure; some unable to attend school due to symptoms.