'Secret ketamine addiction killed my daughter'

The mother of a young woman who spent months in excruciating pain before her death has issued an urgent warning about the dangers of ketamine.

Beth Ashton, 25, weighed less than her four-year-old sister, had a perforated lung and her bladder had "completely collapsed" by the time she died last November.

Natalie Tolan, from Skelmersdale in Lancashire, said she was "blindsided" by how quickly the Class B drug ravaged her daughter's body and has now dedicated her life to spreading awareness.

"There's not another drug I know that will do so much damage to a person's body in such a small amount of time," she told the BBC.

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In her early 20s, Beth lived independently, had a promising career working in a pharmacy, loved make-up and beauty and had a wide circle of friends.

By the summer of 2024, Beth's health had been all but destroyed by ketamine, initially developed as a horse tranquiliser but which has become widely abused as a party drug thanks to its hallucinogenic effects.

For the last weeks of her life, Natalie, now 44, watched her daughter writhing in agony as her bladder was stripped of its lining - a condition known as ketamine bladder syndrome.

"The flare-ups would leave her screaming on the floor," she said.

"I would have to give her fresh hot-water bottle after hot-water bottle to the point it would be burning her actual skin - but the pain on the outside is a distraction from that excruciating pain that's going on the inside."

Natalie said at times Beth would spend hours lying with her body "contorted" into specific positions that enabled her to bear the agony.

By the time she died, Beth's bladder could hold no more than a few drops of liquid and she would frequently pass pieces of its lining in her urine - an intensely painful process.

But as Beth became a teenager and a young adult, Natalie said she had not noticed any signs her daughter was using drugs to any significant extent.

"She was intelligent, funny, witty," Natalie said.

"She was the life and soul of the party, people gravitated to her because she was such a good friend.

"She always put others before herself, probably right up until the end, because that was just the person she was."

Natalie said she accepted she probably would not have known if Beth was experimenting with recreational drug use in her youth.

However, she said she believed any casual use of ketamine became something more serious after 2019 when Beth suffered a "horrendous" stillbirth, losing her baby son at 38 weeks due to pre-eclampsia - a dangerous blood pressure complication.

Over the next couple of years, she also lost her grandfather and an uncle, which hit her hard.

From that point, Natalie noticed her daughter seemed to be suffering increasingly frequent health problems and pain relating to her kidneys and bladder.

At the time, she believed the issue was related to the after-effects of pre-eclampsia.

By the summer of 2024, Beth was losing weight dramatically, at one stage dropping a stone within six weeks.

Natalie said the only logical explanation she could think of was an eating disorder, but the truth became clear on 9 September that year when Beth was admitted to hospital.

"When I walked into the hospital room, it didn't even look like her anymore," she said.

"She had lost so much weight and I broke down. It was shocking."

Natalie said it was only then that Beth opened up about her secret addiction.

One of the most "insidious" problems, Natalie said, was as the pain increased, ketamine became one of the only ways of numbing it - causing further damage.

Shortly after Beth came clean about her addiction, Matthew Perry - star of the sitcom Friends, which they were "big fans of" - died of a ketamine overdose.

Then James Lee Williams, who won the first season of Ru Paul's Drag Race UK performing as The Vivienne, also died in similar circumstances.

"From that point on, it just felt like ketamine-related deaths were everywhere," Natalie said.

"But at that point, I think everyone was talking about overdoses, and it's only been over the last 12 months that we're seeing that it's not just that. Long-term use will cause devastating effects on the body and will lead ultimately to it shutting down."

Over the next six weeks, Beth moved in with her mother - but Natalie said she knew her daughter would still leave the house to use the drug when the pain became unbearable.

One Saturday morning, after Beth had been to stay at her father's house, she said she had answered the door to Beth's uncle.

Natalie said: "I just said, 'Is she in hospital again?' And he just stood there and he shook his head. And I knew, I knew by the look on his face that she was gone."

Since her daughter's death, Natalie began hosting coffee mornings with a young woman from Liverpool, Megan Taylor, who is in recovery from ketamine addiction.

From there, the sessions evolved into West Lancashire Ketamine Awareness, an organisation Natalie founded to work with young people, parents, councils and police to spread the message.

From her conversations with other parents and young people, Natalie said she had come to believe that drug dealers were deliberately targeting children with "pocket money prices", sometimes as cheap as £8 per gram.

"I know that it's everywhere. And it's part of a normalised teen culture," she said.

"Unfortunately, there's some people who are already trapped in this cycle but there's so many young people out there, if we can get the word out of what this drug will do to them.

"I mean, they're not going to be going to closing parties in Ibiza. The likelihood is if you're using this drug for a period of five to 10 years, you're not going to make it."

• If you have been affected by the issues in this story, you can visit the BBC Action Line for support

Natalie said after launching her organisation, she had spoken to families whose children were in school wearing incontinence pads or adult nappies designed for the elderly thanks to ketamine abuse.

In England, the number of under-18s seeking treatment for addiction who describe ketamine as a problem rose from 335 to 917 between 2020-21 and 2023-24, according to the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System.

Natalie urged other parents to have conversations with their children before it was too late.

"Obviously losing Beth, it's not just shattered my world but so many others and that's what happens with this drug," she said.

"It's not just the person who takes it. It's everyone around them that suffers."

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