The party drug that's 'readily available, cheap and attractive to children'

In a dimly lit room in Manchester, a social media investigator is showing me just how easy it is to buy ketamine online.

He is one of two officers at Greater Manchester Police who have been specially trained to find the platforms, forums and sites being used by criminals to sell drugs. "It's effectively run like a legitimate business in the way that Amazon sells legitimate items," he says.

"The platforms that are being used, it's Snapchat and Telegram, we see a lot of stuff on WhatsApp, basically in an attempt to avoid traditional policing tactics." What the social media investigator describes is a game of cat and mouse, driven by a Class B drug that is being taken in record numbers. "It's basically trying to catch up with criminals.

If you put it in terms of cars, criminals are driving around in sports cars and things like that," he says. "Police are driving round in Fiestas and Astras, and this is exactly the same thing.

But we only have to be lucky one day, they have to be lucky every day." Against the backdrop of increasing media coverage and greater public awareness of ketamine, the popular party drug is now firmly in the sights of police forces across the country, including GMP. Detective Superintendent Joseph Harrop, who leads the force's serious organised crime division, says ketamine is presenting officers with unique challenges.

"I think one of the issues is that it's readily available and it's really cheap, which is why I think it's attractive to children and young people," he says. "There is a worrying trend that younger and younger children are using it.

We've got children as young as 10, either with ketamine or involved in the supply of ketamine." Read more:The drug addiction leaving users in chronic painCould ketamine be used to treat depression? DSI Harrop says another way organised crime groups are making a profit from ketamine is by exporting the drug to countries where it is more tightly regulated or less easily available. He says GMP seized 50kg of ketamine in the financial year before last, a figure he believes increased substantially in 2025, because his officers made the substance more of a priority.

In his words, ketamine seizures went up "exponentially.