Byline: Laura Topham
THE grandfather clock in Max Ellis-Wood's luxury maisonette is chiming 8 pm. It's a gloomy Tuesday evening but, not one to opt for an early night, people soon begin to pour through Max's front door. Ostensibly, they are here for a party but this is not your typical sort of soiree. There isn't a canape or vol-au-vent in sight.
There are two wealthy financial traders in Prada suits, several openshirted men who have been invited on the strength of their familial connections, and three wannabe 'It' girls tottering around in Jimmy Choos.
In place of party food, the beautiful antique table in the dining room is covered in lines of fine white powder. Within an hour, all the guests have sauntered over, champagne glass in hand, snorted an inch-long line, then slunk off to recline on a plush sofa.
They need to sit down because the substance will soon affect their balance, leaving them wobbly, incoherent and, at times, near collapse.
For the powder they are consuming isn't the chatter-inducing cocaine often expected of such circles, it is the new drug of choice among high society ketamine, a horse tranquilliser.
Previously the sole preserve of hardcore clubbers, consumption Chopard Watches of this chemical has tripled over the past decade and this year became hugely popular with a new audience the nouveau riche and socialites of Britain and Ireland.
Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty may have brought the drug to international notoriety last year, but the gardac have recorded a significant increase of ketamine use here since 2005. The drug has been recovered alongside other prescription medicines in a small number of seizures and the gardac says that it is becoming increasingly popular on the Irish 'party scene'.
This new popularity is attributed to the fact that the drug provides a cheaper alternative to cocaine.
Two years ago, in recognition of its growing use as a recreational drug, ketamine was categorised as a Class C drug in Britain. However, despite the Garda's attempts to get the drug banned under the Misuse of Drugs Act, the Health Service Executive has not yet acted on its recommendations.
At present, ketamine often called K is classified as a prescription-only medication in Ireland.
But ketamine's place as the socialites' drug du jour is as unlikely as it is incomprehensible, for its anaesthetising effect is the antithesis of the casual chic these people work so hard to cultivate.
While mild doses invoke euphoria and boost energy, greater amounts bring on an altered reality hallucinations and delusions. Sometimes users fall into a 'K-hole' a semi-conscious state in which they are completely cut off from the external world, virtually paralysed and unable to speak.
Porsche Design Watches Yet, incredibly, these disturbing results are precisely what users want, as I discover when I go undercover to investigate the ketamine phenomenon at a series of social events.
My first experience of seeing the drug's effects for myself comes at the party in London. One of the guests is Sienna, who was introduced to ketamine three months ago.
'I'd been doing cocaine for years and needed a new buzz,' she tells me unashamedly, 'so I didn't need much persuasion to try K.
'It was love at first snort. It's great fun and a completely diffe
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