Drugs Cherry Healey: Old Before My Time

This programme contains some strong language and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

We all know that drinking... drugs...

and fast food are bad for you.

The bit I like most...is the skin!

But when it comes to young Brits,

nothing gets in the way of a good time.

Do you think you're invincible

Oh, aye! My motto is you only live once

There are health consequences, but... Worry about them later!

Why dwell on something you may not get? Who cares?!

But these days, a life of excess isn't just leaving young people hung-over,

it's accelerating their age.

I'd get out of breath walking t'shop!

Like a 90-year-old woman or summat.

Hit by chronic conditions usually the preserve of pensioners,

I'll walk into a room to go and get something then wonder what I've done it.

It makes you feel old. It makes you feel, "What's going on?"

I'm on a ward with people who are 40 years older than me

and probably half of them are fitter than me.

I struggle to walk properly.

That young person mentality of "I'm going to live for ever",

you don't think about the ramifications on your body.

Is there any hope for their prematurely old bodies?

I didn't even think I could damage my heart through taking drugs.

Deep breath, right in, right in

Lungs feel like they're actually collapsing.

They have got the lungs of an old man.

Or are they past the point of no return?

Having to cope with gout,

and liver and heart problems in your 20s is kind of unbelievable.

This is very young, and already into super-obesity.

The likelihood is, it will shorten her life by 15 years.

I want to find out what life is like for young people

who've become old before their time.

D'you think you can stop?

Yeah. It's just going to take a hell of a lot of willpower.

In this film, I'm going to meet the young people whose bodies

have aged because of their drug use.

I don't feel that I can act and run around like a normal 20-year-old.

I would say that in my own body

I could feel anywhere from 40 to 80 years old.

I've been rushed into hospital cos I had a stroke.

I was 18 at the time.

And I'll be with them as they face facts about the elderly ailments

that have hit them 30 years too soon.

The chances of you having older arteries than you should have

One person whose body has irreversible damage,

is 23-year-old Chris from Hampshire.

At 16, Chris was a hardcore raver, taking a cocktail of drugs,

including ketamine.

But a year on, he'd taken so much ketamine, that at just 7,

he had to have his bladder removed.

Basically, taking a lot of ketamine in a very short period of time

He now has a new bladder made from his bowel.

Where the bladder is now made of bowel material,

and bowel material naturally creates mucus.

Basically, what I'm going to do is insert the catheter

using KY jelly into my belly button.

It's just washing the bladder out basically.

It's saline water.

See you can see the mucus come out there.

I'm basically just washing it out.

Getting all the mucus out.

Ketamine use has doubled in the UK since 2006

and it's now one of the most popular drugs on the party scene.

Chris started taking drugs when he was 12 years old.

I started off smoking cannabis then I gradually worked my way up

to heavier things until it eventually got to ketamine.

Started off with a gram, working the way up to 2g, 3g, 4g

until it got to 10, 15 grams.

Absolutely wicked time.

In 2006, when Chris was just 16

I was trying to go to the toilet

and I couldn't - in an immense amount of pain.

But when I did manage to go it was like a big lump of goo

blood, mess everywhere, it was horrible.

Chris went to see a specialist

who told him his bladder had shrunk to a fraction of its normal size.

If you think you've got a 5ml bladder -

that's the same as an old person's bladder.

Smaller than an old person's.

A normal bladder can hold up to 500ml of urine.

The bladder walls expand when the bladder fills with urine

and contract when the bladder is emptied.

Extreme ketamine use can cause stiffness and scarring

in the bladder walls.

This means that the bladder can only expand

to about a tenth of its normal size.

And having such a small bladder

can lead to typically old people's problems,

as Chris discovered to his cost

Course I was embarrassed wetting myself in front of my mates.

Yeah, it was quite embarrassing

To avoid a lifetime of incontinence, Chris was given two options.

Either he could have a catheter bag attached to his hip...

Trying to pull a bird at 17 with a bag attached to your knob

is a no-go.

I have difficulty enough nowadays.

..or he could have his bladder removed completely

and a new bladder constructed from parts of his bowel.

At the age of 17, Chris had surgery

usually reserved for people in their 60s or 70s

who've developed conditions such as bladder cancer.

Obviously, it stops me doing a lot of things.

I used to play a lot of rugby can't do that any more -

cos it only takes one blow to my stomach

and who knows what will happen?

He now has to syringe mucus out of his new bladder

every two weeks, and for the rest of his life.

he's going into hospital today

to find out how well they're working.

Just got my blood results back from the doctor,

the kidney function's at 33%,

a person of my age should be about 60.

Chris also has to live with the knowledge that his new bladder

won't last for ever.

The bladder I think only lasts for 20 to 30 years,

so hopefully they'll come up with something new by then.

It's a sobering thought for a 23-year-old.

But Chris is by no means the only person in his 20s

to suffer the consequences of ketamine abuse.

Do your mates all know about this?

Yeah, everyone knows about it.

What do they think?

The people that are doing it?

They're all pretty much having the operation now.

So what exactly is ketamine?

And what on earth is it doing to our bodies?

I'm going to St George's Hospital in London

to get the low-down from leading toxicologist John Ramsey,

a man in his 60s who knows more about party drugs

than your average 18-year-old.

So, what is ketamine?

The media always talk about ketamine as being a horse tranquiliser.

In fact, it's an anaesthetic.

It's used in both human and veterinary medicine,

and has been for years.

A very useful thing.

It's used to perform surgical procedures.

So why is it used on the party scene?

Well, it's used because in lower doses,

it produces these sort of out-of body sensations.

If you've ever had an anaesthetic

you go through this sort of pre-med phase,

where you drift off to unconsciousness,

and if you take a small enough dose you stay in that sort of drifty state

and this is what people want.

Is it toxic?

Well, it's not toxic, if it's used for its intended purpose.

I mean it's been used as an anaesthetic for donkey's years

without any problems.

bladder disease may be just the tip of the iceberg

in getting pensioner-type problems.

I'm going to meet 29-year-old Dave from Bradford,

who's been using ketamine for eight years

and has noticed a disturbing deterioration in his memory.

I'll always walk into a room to go and get something

and then wonder why I've done it.

Now, a lot of people go, "Oh, yeah, I do that all the time, brother "

Trust me, it's not ALL the time -

you usually remember what you've gone to get, right?

When you're walking in and out there ten times...

that's when you need to think,

"OK, there's something not quite dancing right up there."

Ketamine's main effect is to block a receptor in the brain

known as the NMDA receptor,

which is important for how we learn and respond to new experiences

Although spread throughout the brain,

these receptors are hugely concentrated in an area critical for memory,

called the hippocampus.

Taking lots of ketamine seriously interferes with this area,

so causes memory loss.

And it seems that in really heavy users,

their memory can seem as bad as someone in early stages of dementia.

This can continue even when they're not under the influence of ketamine.

How much were you taking when it was at its peak?

Well, I was going out each weekend pretty much.

It'd be, "Oh, well, it's Sunday I'll chill out."

You might have some left on a Monday so it's, like, "Oh, well .."

And suddenly it's Wednesday

and you're having a mid-week peak of the week, mid-week session,

then it's Sunday again

and you're, like, blooming heck what have I done?

How d'you think it's affected your memory?

This is it - you're asking me loads of questions about the past,

and I'm trying to remember them

It's mainly remembering to do certain tasks

and my vocabulary.

Speaking fluently about a few things.

It must be unbelievably frustrating if it's happening quite a lot.

You start thinking you've got bloody Alzheimer's or something.

It's just not needed.

Dave was first introduced to ketamine when he was 21

and started going to raves.

I remember coming to a party in these woods. A mental one!

Huge speakers, everyone having a laugh.

I was taking quite a bit - bit of buzz, bit of ket, bit of MD. .

Stuff like that.

But for Dave what started out as a bit of fun with friends

soon turned into a serious addiction which took over his life.

The effect that ketamine had on my life was quite traumatic.

I couldn't get up, I couldn't go to work.

I couldn't afford to run my car any more.

Fell out with my girlfriend.

They were bad times, dark times

Dave has now cut down on his ketamine use,

but he hasn't given up completely.

And he's going to have some memory tests to find out

whether his continued use is ageing his brain.

What are your biggest worries?

If it's become a permanent thing.

Then you've got to live with it for all your life,

and I don't want that.

I didn't sign up for it.

Dave's far from the only young person who should be worrying.

With ketamine having such a devastating effect on the body,

I want to find out why it's still so popular.

So I'm off to the place where it all started for Dave -

a free party.

How it works is that you go on a website

and you find out where it is the night of the party.

So I should be finding out in the next 15 minutes.

All I know is that it's in a London secret forest within the M25.

Oh, hooray. They've posted the number up.

'Hello, this is the TriptoNarnia party line,

'the postcode for tonight's party is N18...

'This is an Alice In Wonderland fancy dress party,

'so get your costumes out.'

So I've now got to find an Alice In Wonderland costume

to wear to a party in the middle of a forest

where there will probably be lots of people taking drugs.

This is all becoming rather surreal.

Finished my make-up, got my outfit.

I wonder if I'm the first pregnant Mad Hatter

to go to a party in a wood, I hope so.

It's 15 years since I last went to a rave,

so I really don't know quite what to expect.

I'm just really intrigued to find out what people are taking,

why they're taking it,

and whether they worry about what it's doing to their bodies.

Why do you take drugs? We don't do this

because we're bad kids, we do this

because we want to express ourselves,

and that right there is expression.

Do you worry about the health consequences?

Of course, there are health consequences,

but...worry about them later.

So the general consensus seems to be live for today

and worry about the health consequences tomorrow.

But what amazes me is that some people believe that if you

choose the right drug, there won't even be any health consequences

Do you think weed is actually quite safe? Yeah.

I would protest for it to be legalised

because I believe it is so much of a lesser threat than alcohol

and cigarettes - even cigarettes, I would think, are much worse.

# Everything that kills me makes me feel alive... #

So what exactly does the happy stick do to our lungs?

I've come to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle to find out

from respiratory expert Dr Graham Burns.

it's herbal, it's not going to damage your lungs

in the same way as cigarettes.

People are fooling themselves if they think that.

Patients have come through this department,

they've smoked very little in the way of cigarettes,

but they've smoked cannabis, young people we're talking about,

people in their 20s, and they have got the lungs of an old man.

So actually, the cannabis is producing the same type

of negative consequences, but accelerated?

That's how it seems to be.

I've seen a young person of 25

they'd smoked cannabis for a matter of seven years or so, and they had

almost totally destroyed lungs whole areas of the lung, literally

half of the lung just gone, empty space within their body cavity

So it had gone, it had dissolved?

Yeah, it was eaten away by the effects of the drug.

Oh, my God, that is horrendous

And Dr Burns has even got some pictures to prove it.

The CT scan gives you a picture

as if you've been through a bacon slicer.

First of all, this is a picture of perfectly healthy lungs.

The little white lines you see are the blood vessels running through

the lungs, but if I move on and show you emphysema,

it can be as dramatic as that. Oh, my God, that's severe.

That's a big area of nothingness, empty space.

So, it's just gone, the lung has gone.

And even if that individual stops smoking now,

that will never return, that's permanent.

'Emphysema is a form of chronic lung disease,

'and one of the biggest causes is a lifetime of smoking cigarettes.

'To see signs of it in

'a cannabis smoker in their 20s is truly shocking.'

I'm so misinformed about cannabis.

I've always heard that it's not that bad,

but actually, what I've heard from the doctor is that it is just

In fact, according to the British Lung Foundation,

for every joint smoked than every cigarette.

The fact that 80% of the cannabis sold on our streets is now

super strength skunk could have a lot to do with it.

Two people who have every reason to worry about their heavy

cannabis use are 20-year old Chris from Southampton

and 23-year-old Jodie from Blackburn.

They've come to have some respiratory tests to find out

just how old their lungs really are.

Nice to meet you, I'm Cherry.

'Jodie's been smoking cannabis since she was 12.'

How much are you smoking right now?

At the moment, twice a week, maybe ?10 a night.

?10 in cash? Yeah. And how much did you used to smoke?

I could smoke anything up to ?20 a night,

smoking maybe an ounce in a fortnight.

So that's hundreds of pounds a week.

I worked it out, it was just over ?300 a month.

Jodie has been surrounded by drugs all her life.

When she was growing up, her mum, Rachel, was addicted to heroin

and Jodie found herself having to look after her two younger sisters.

Being a mum at the age of six to two newborn babies,

it never gave me the chance to be a child.

She didn't tell me that's what I had to do,

she didn't say, "Right you're going to look after the kids,"

but because she was away with the drugs,

she didn't automatically pick up the role of being a mother,

so it was like, there's this gap that needs filling.

I felt horrendously guilty, because I didn't treat her as a child,

it wasn't a mother and daughter relationship.

She was like my right-hand man

Jodie's mum has now been clean for years.

It was seeing her lights go out she wasn't Jodie,

drugs just seemed to, they took the shine off her.

Can you open it? Can you do it Big boy! Come on, then. Yay!

Jodie now has a child of her own,

and she doesn't want to treat him the way her mum treated her.

I've never had that proper relationship with my mum.

I think because ours was so broken, I'm trying to relive ours

and make sure I don't make the same mistakes as her, through my son

Sorry, I'm getting a bit upset

My mum, she had a physical addiction to heroin.

All this while, I've been saying to my mum, "How dare you,"

you know, "You've ruined my life."

And then I look at him and think, "I'm doing exactly the same."

'Jodie's not only suffered severe depression

'and paranoia from her cannabis use, but she's also worried about

'what the drug is doing to her physically.'

You can't go any higher than that!

I do really get out of breath sometimes

when I'm playing with my son, and it does make me worry about what damage

I've actually done to my lungs smoking fags and using cannabis

I find myself walking a long distance, even just round the town,

shopping, I start getting out of breath and find I need to sit down.

These are symptoms you'd expect to find in an elderly patient

with emphysema or lung cancer, not in an otherwise healthy 23-year old.

Someone even younger whose lungs are suffering is 20-year-old Chris.

He's been smoking cannabis from an incredibly early age.

act and run around like a normal 20-year-old, that's for sure.

I would say that in my own body

I could feel anywhere from 40 to 80 years old.

When did you first have a spliff?

I was 13 when I first started smoking.

It was a friend's mum who turned round and... What, a mum?! Yeah

She came back with a bong in hand and asked me if I wanted one.

So, what? At 13, you went from your first spliff to doing a bong?

Yeah, that was it, and that's how it all really started.

Chris had to leave his life in Southampton behind

when his cannabis use spiralled out of control.

And this is the first time he's been back to his drug-taking hang-out

since he gave up, 13 months ago

This park was a massive part of my addiction and my using.

We used to come down on the weekends, somebody would be like,

"Oh I've got a tenner, we'll go down, we'll get a smoke,"

the drugs would arrive, we'd start using, we'd start

smoking, we'd start drinking

and we'd be passing around joint after joint, time after time.

But for Chris and his friends, the highs came with serious lows.

I was smoking crack. Were you? Fuck, man!

And are you off that shit now? Yeah.

I'm only 19 years old, I started when I was 17.

I've collapsed a couple of times,

I've been rushed into hospital cos I had a stroke.

And that's what scared me the most,

cos I thought about it, 19 years old,

and when I was 18 at the time, I had a minor stroke and they said

to me, "You need to get off the stuff,

"or you're going to have a heart attack." And that scared me.

Chris's drug use also got out of hand.

He went from spliffs and bongs to legal highs and pills.

He wasn't eating, he wasn't sleeping.

And he went down to seven stone

Chris eventually sought help for his addiction

at Castle Craig rehab centre in Scotland.

I was the youngest here in the intensive care unit

and the oldest was well above me.

One night during a thunderstorm I cried my eyes out in bed

and I got out a piece of paper

and I wrote as large as I could on that piece of paper,

"I just want to live."

Chris has now put his demons behind him

and hasn't touched a drug for 13 months.

But he's terrified that, at the age of 20,

he might have the lungs of an OAP.

There was a time when I was smoking solid pot and I did have problems

breathing and normal running about and things like that.

It'll be interesting to see what happens

then when Chris gets his lungs checked out.

In London, ketamine user Dave is off to University College London

to find out whether his memory is as bad as he thinks it is.

'I've come along too, to meet

'Professor of Psychopharmacology, Val Curran,

'who's spent 12 years studying the effects of ketamine on our brains.'

When somebody takes ketamine, which part of the brain is it affecting?

What is going on?

Well, like any drug, it affects several parts of the brain,

but one of the major effects is that it impairs your memory

And for someone who has taken it many times

over a number of years, how bad does memory loss affect them?

For those people who are using heavily, and that's mainly

people who use every day and are probably addicted, then

the memory loss will be quite marked and they would really have problems

at school or at college, they'd have difficulty with exams,

difficulty holding their jobs down.

Dave was using ketamine every day

I'm now going to give you 60 seconds to say as many

words as you can think of that begin with the letter F.

Foxtrot.

Um...

Freddy.

Fantastic.

Val and her team have discovered that young ketamine users

often have trouble recalling names, words and conversations.

These are all common signs of dementia in old people,

and not symptoms you'd expect to see in someone in their 20s.

I'm going to give you a category,

so the category is fruit, try not to repeat the same word

Orange, apple, banana...

er, strawberries, blueberries,

blackberry, blueberry...

Can't think of anything else.

OK, that's it, that's great, thanks.

That was interesting, because when you were trying to retrieve

all the names of fruit that you knew,

the thing that really stood out was that you repeated yourself a lot.

And then, when it was just trying to say words beginning with

the letter F, so, that's more to do with the sound memory,

what happened then when you just went blank?

I couldn't think of anything. OK.

We find that people who do a lot of ketamine often find that

task really hard. Right.

Do you think that Dave's ketamine use has affected his brain?

He's got a slight problem with trying to bring memories back,

to retrieve memories.

I would expect someone as intelligent as Dave

to maybe do a bit better on that task.

We've done a lot of research

over the last 14 years with ketamine users.

And the guys who come and do research with us

who have given up for at least a year,

they seem to do as well as people who have not done

bucketloads of ketamine. So, that's kind of hopeful.

'So, if Dave gave up the ketamine completely,

'his memory could go back to normal.

'But is he ready to say goodbye to it for good?'

How often do you do it now?

Don't know. Honestly. Probably, right...

It'd be once a month, maybe. Maybe a bit more sometimes.

Now that you know that there is likely to have been some effect

on your brain from the ketamine do you think you can stop, that's it?

I have stopped. But you haven't.

I have, right...

I don't need to take that product,

I take it when I want to take it.

Need's a necessity and want's a desire.

Something tells me Dave isn't ready to give it up completely.

But if he doesn't, his memory loss may well get worse.

Last year in the UK, 12,000 people were admitted to hospital

with drug-related health problems.

And a quarter of these were in their teens or twenties

One person who knows only too well how frightening this can be,

is 28-year-old ex-cocaine addict Vicky, from Halifax.

I went on quite a bad binge,

where I'd been up for five or six days...and I got that bad

chest pains that I rang a taxi and they took me to hospital.

I went really spaced out and then I started getting palpitations

and chest pains, and my heart rate kept speeding up.

I thought I was having a heart attack.

Cocaine gives the heart a massive injection of adrenaline,

which causes heart rate and blood pressure to shoot up.

At the same time it causes the arteries supplying the heart

with blood to narrow down.

This disrupts the blood flow to the heart

and can cause heart attacks,

where part of the heart muscle dies,

or fatal rhythm disorders where the heart stops beating.

Vicky was told by doctors at the hospital that she wasn't having

a heart attack, but her heart was beating at twice its normal rate.

And she was put on beta blockers, a heart medicine usually prescribed

for people in their 70s or 80s with high blood pressure or angina.

My mum - she's on beta blockers and I thought how come

me mum's taking them and I'm taking them as well and I'm in my 20s

Are you Vicky? I'm Cherry.

'Vicky was introduced to drugs at 14, when she had her first joint.

'And it didn't take long for things to progress.'

16 is when I started taking pills and cocaine and things.

It took two years, and I were smoking crack as well.

Smoking crack? Mm. How did that happen?

I just started getting in with the wrong crowd

and I were kicked out of home at 16 and had my own flat,

a bedsit, and it just became a party house.

Run me through a typical night out.

I'd start with like a gram of coke getting ready,

then go into town and buy more coke, probably another two gram,

then go to a club, whatever I could get me hands on there,

pills. I'd take up to ten pills a night, ten Es on top of the coke.

You took ten pills in one night

Yeah - in the space of a night How are you not dead?!

I feel a bit overwhelmed to be honest...

The amount of drugs

that Vicky took, what she put her body through,

it's quite hard to comprehend.

To go from smoking a joint to doing

crack in two years and just think it was a laugh.

I just worry so much about what she's done to her body

and I hope that she's stopped in time.

An hour after cocaine is used,

the risk of a heart attack rises 24-fold and a quarter of

are prompted by cocaine.

To make matters worse,

the cocaine you buy on the street is laced with all sorts of things

you really wouldn't want to be putting up your nose.

Having tested over 29,000 different drugs in his London lab,

Dr John has some frightening facts.

How pure is the coke that's sold on the street?

It's round about 20% on average but it can be as low as 2 or 3%

It's cut principally with Benzocaine, that's the commonest diluent.

What is Benzocaine?

Benzocaine's a local anaesthetic, so it's used in things like this

genital itching cream.

That's really not nice.

It's also used in some forms of condom,

because it's a local anaesthetic it can delay ejaculation.

What else is it mixed with?

It's also cut with caffeine, which of course we find in coffee

and in some tablets.

Like caffeine tablets.

Yes, and a gram of caffeine

if you snort that can actually put you in hospital.

Why would it put you in hospital?

If you drink too much coffee you know you get jittery

and get headaches, well, just imagine that multiplied by ten or 100.

Anything else it's mixed with? Boric acid for example.

That doesn't sound very nice.

Boric acid is used in cockroach killer, for example. Oh, my God

"If mistakenly taken, seek medical advice immediately "

that doesn't sound fun.

So you don't really know what you're putting up your nose and into your bloodstream.

Absolutely no idea at all. Could be cockroach killer.

Could be.

Vicky's prolonged cocaine use has caused symptoms you'd usually

associate with someone three times her age.

I'd get out of breath walking to the shop, you know, like a 90-year-old woman or something

I was coughing up blood, I was getting water infections

passing blood, and I just thought you are killing yourself here.

Vicky's still experiencing palpitations,

and she's terrified she may have caused lasting damage to her heart.

Back in Newcastle it's the moment of truth for cannabis smokers

Jodie and Chris - who are about to have their lungs tested.

The tests will measure two areas of Chris and Jodie's lungs.

I want you to pretend like you're blowing a massive balloon up.

Take a really deep breath in, tube in, push!

The spirometer measures how tight the air tubes are,

whether the air tubes are wide open as they should be, or have become

narrow because of disease.

Push it right across the page! Fantastic.

OK, get your breath back. JODIE LAUGHS

And blow...

This test here, measures the business end of the lung, deep into

the lungs, where the oxygen gets taken up into the blood.

Round, blast it! That's right.

Right out, right out, right out

Keep going, keep going, keep going. Fantastic, well done, Chris.

What's happening, what do you feel? You're bending over.

Yeah, my lungs feel like they're actually collapsing.

It looks like Chris's lungs are not in very good shape.

It seems to be an example of different bodies being able

to cope with different levels.

Big deep breath!

He was able to blow half as hard as Jodie.

Well done, brilliant.

Get your breath back.

SHE MOUTHS

Are you all right, hon? Yeah. Sure? Yep.

Give me a second, I'll get my balance back. Are you OK? Yeah.

Why when you say "yeah", do I hear "no, that was really horrible"

No. It wasn't horrible, it was just very uncomfortable and I

didn't expect to feel like my lungs were collapsing on themselves.

It doesn't inspire confidence in a positive test result - to be honest.

Time for the results and I've got everything crossed for Chris. But if

Nice to see you. Come through..

You've been worried about these

because you've been smoking cannabis, is that right?

I've had periods of smoking at least 20 a day, if not more.

Well, for you the breathing tests are what

we would say in the normal range.

So it's a positive, take that as a positive.

I really just can't explain how much of a shock this is.

You weren't expecting that?

I'm so relieved, I don't know about you but I'm so relieved.

So this is kind of saying at the tender age of 20 we've got away

with it in terms of the lungs, but this gives us no guarantees that the

cannabis and the cigarettes aren't wreaking damage everywhere else

Whilst your lungs are saying OK so far,

now's the time to say that's it finished. Exactly.

I'm so happy for you, that is just the best news.

I'm just in a bit of shock. I know, I know.

I'm absolutely over the moon for him that it's OK, and I think

so encouraging for him to keep going in the direction he's going in

Now I'm just really hoping that Jodie gets some good news too.

The air tubes themselves are relatively normal,

close to normal and that's good

When we look at how the lungs are working

deep on the inside or how the lungs are handling the oxygen that's being

delivered we have seen some damage there...

..which is almost certainly

related to either cigarette smoking or cannabis smoking.

Yeah, that's quite shocking.

Quite shocking.

I really didn't think I'd done any damage.

Let me tell you what will happen if you continue to smoke.

You'll get to the point where simply walking down the street, just

occasionally you'll have to stop to catch your breath

a little bit, if you continue to smoke after that you won't

get as far as the corner shop.

And if you continue to smoke

after that - the front door of your house is the limit of your world.

Now, that's not living, that's not a life.

I'm afraid the lung won't repair, the lung is permanently damaged

But this is damage that you can carry

and you will hopefully have a long and prosperous life,

but you need to stop now because time will run out. Yeah

Time will run out.

Definitely. That's it.

I thought it was just going to be a bit of damage and just

brush it off, but I've gone a bit trembly and a bit blown away by it.

It's not repairable, but from here onwards it's...

You can stop damaging it any further.

D'you think you can stop the cannabis?

Yeah, it's just going to take a hell of a lot of willpower.

But you've caught it really early, most people wait

until they are really unwell before they see somebody. Yeah

That was quite hard to hear, wasn't it? Yeah.

I'm really sad that Jodie's had the news that she's got damage

to the lungs, but at the same time I'm really happy that she's caught

it this early, that - if she stops smoking now -

it's not going to be fatal.

But Jodie will have to live with damaged lungs for the rest of her life.

It just really hurt knowing that inside I have damaged a vital organ.

Your lungs are what make you breathe, they keep you living,

so to know that I've damaged that is worrying, really worrying.

Play with the balls!

I've already done a bit of damage to my lungs now,

if I chose to carry on, by the time I'm 30 and Kivor's ten,

he'll be at that age where he wants to play football,

he'll be doing school activities and sports days and stuff,

I don't want to be that parent that's, "Oh, God, I can't..."

Passing out, can't take him to the park to play football, all because I smoke.

The lung tests have clearly been a wake-up call for Jodie.

Her challenge now is to try and stay off cannabis to avoid

ageing her lungs even further.

While cannabis can cause irreparable damage to young people's lungs

cocaine is the drug that can play havoc with your heart.

In fact it is the most common cause of chest pains in people under 0.

28-year-old ex-cocaine addict Vicky has come to London to get her

heart tested.

Nervous and scared, really. Really frightened.

All right. Well, I'll be there for you.

She's seeing by cardiologist Dr Dymond, who I'm hoping will tell me why cocaine is

so bad for our hearts.

Of all the drugs

does cocaine affect the heart the most dramatically?

Yes, of all the recreational drugs cocaine is the one that

causes the most admissions

to accident and emergency departments around the world,

it's the one that has the most implications in people dying suddenly from heart disease.

Does cocaine age a person's heart?

It makes it behave like a much older heart, yes.

It promotes narrowing of the arteries, in someone

who's 25 or 30, which they wouldn't have got until much much later

if ever, if they hadn't used cocaine.

Cocaine can also cause blood clots, furred up arteries, an enlarged

Heart attacks due to cocaine are one of the most common

causes of sudden death in young people.

MONITOR FLATLINES

If somebody has symptoms of having taken cocaine, chest pains,

heart problems and then they stop, can they fully recover?

Yes, they can, and young people who haven't got widespread

vascular disease that somebody in their 50s, 60s or 70s may have,

they may well recover completely with no ill effects.

Let's hope that Vicky is one of the lucky ones.

Her body has taken a serious beating after all those years of drug abuse.

Is she past the point of no return?

What I need you to do is to turn onto your left-hand side

so you're facing that direction Mm-hm.

And as you turn over, just slip your left arm out of the sleeve for me.

Ready? Here we go.

Vicky is going to have an echocardiogram,

which will show the structure of her heart and heart valves,

providing an insight into how well it's functioning.

What we're particularly interested in in Vicky's case

is how well this chamber, the left ventricle,

is contracting and relaxing.

You can see it moving in with each heartbeat

and out between heartbeats.

Those palpitations that you have may be related to cocaine,

cos it can cause rhythm disorders where the heart

beats much too fast, and that can cause people to black out

and lose consciousness, or even, God forbid, die.

You know when you're taking drugs you don't really

think about the consequences, you don't think about

the consequences at all, especially of your body.

But you see, you're in the age group where heart problems that arise

may well be due to using cocaine,

because under normal circumstances a young woman of 28,

we wouldn't see anyone getting heart problems,

or at least artery problems at the age of 28.

It's the moment of truth for Vicky.

After 12 years of heavy cocaine abuse,

The heart muscle is contracting very strongly.

I can't see any areas of the heart that are weak.

It all looks all right, I'm glad to say.

Well done. Thank you. Thank you very much.

I'm very happy for you. That is really good news.

I feel relieved.

Whatever your chest pains were

they haven't done any obvious, large amounts of damage

to your heart muscle.

'That is such a relief.

'And I've got to say, this girl must be made of strong stuff!

'But Vicky's not quite out of the woods yet.'

We still don't know what's caused your chest pains and you've been

a cigarette smoker and a cocaine user, so the chances of you having

older arteries than you should have would be higher than we would like.

Right. I'm going to wag my finger at you.

You're not going to start again, are you?

No, I'm not. Keep well. Thank you, I will do.

Do you think that the results of that

will encourage you to look after yourself?

Yeah, of course it will.

I've never really thought about damaging my insides before

but now I know it's only probably one more drug away.

I mean, who's to say just cos it's come out that it was OK today,

who's to say next time I use a drug it's not going to be?

And that's really opened my eyes,

that the next drug could really kill you.

The medical profession are now well aware of the harm

cocaine can do to the body.

But there are hundreds of new drugs out there

whose effects are still unknown

And frighteningly, these drugs are legal.

It's actually crazy how easy it is to buy legal highs.

I've just typed into a search engine and loads of sites came up.

This one, I mean, there's a massive list of products.

if you're a young person.

You don't need an ID, you just need a credit card,

internet connection and an address.

There are now 251 legal highs on the market,

with a new one appearing every week.

And young Brits have become

the biggest consumers of them in Europe.

But does anybody really know what's in these drugs,

which are believed to be cooked up in illegal labs in China?

If anybody knows, it'll be toxicologist Dr John.

Have you tested lots of legal highs?

We've analysed hundreds, probably even thousands,

and they contain lots of different chemical compounds. I mean, we know

precisely what the chemicals are but we don't know what the risks are.

These are compounds that have never been used as drugs or never tested

for safety, so the people who take them are effectively guinea pigs.

Last year, 52 people died in the UK after taking legal highs

and a staggering 6,500 were treated in hospital.

The trouble is, even when drugs are banned, the chemists who make them

just come up with a tweaked formula that hasn't been made illegal yet.

How can we keep up with the products that are being made?

I think the honest answer is we can't.

They'll always be one step ahead of us.

I mean, we can buy stuff from head shops, as you've done,

we can buy stuff on the internet, we can look at club amnesty bins,

we can go to music festivals.

We can analyse and find the new compounds

and as soon as we find them we can ban them,

but if we do that it just spawns yet another batch.

So what can we do to make sure people know

that these are dangerous, or be protected from them?

I think, in my view, we have to do something about the demand side.

We just have to try and explain to kids

that they're running too great a risk.

If the demand isn't there, there's no market.

One casualty of the legal high craze was Hester Stewart.

At the age of 21, she had everything to live for.

She was studying molecular medicine at Sussex University

and had plans to become a surgeon.

She was also a student mentor and a cheerleader.

How did you guys meet Hester?

We were all cheerleaders together.

We were all in the same cheerleading squad at Sussex University.

What was she like? She was amazing.

She was... Bubbly, bright, so funny, always having a laugh together

Hess and I were team blonde cos I had blonde hair at the time too,

and we were side bases together

which is a cheerleading stunt position

where you have to be really in sync with the other person.

Were you all quite close?

Yeah. Hess was my best friend, Hess was like my other half.

Tell me about the night she died.

It was our end of season awards dinner for the cheer squad

and the American football team that we cheered for, so it was, like

a really big, grand night out and Hess had a really beautiful dress

that she was so excited about wearing.

We all sat down to dinner, and we'd all have drinks afterwards

and sort of hang out, have some music.

So what happened after the party?

Hess went back to spend some time with a friend,

and they hadn't had very much to drink that night, nobody had

But he chose to take what was then a legal drug called GBL,

and Hester only had half a dose

She went to sleep and fell into a coma and never woke up.

The following morning, two policemen arrived

on the doorstep of Hester's mum Maryon.

They asked to come in, and I said, "What have you got to tell me?

And they just said it was Hester, and I said, "Is she alive?" And they said, "I'm sorry, no.

I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say. That's just..

That's unbearably awful. It's the worst nightmare.

'A combination of GBL and alcohol, both respiratory depressants,

'had caused Hester to stop breathing and fall into a coma.'

When I think about the hours that you put in to a child,

your hopes for them, and...

..to have that taken away from you.

It is beyond devastating and I don't think...it's the wrong

way round to lose a child, it's just not meant to happen that way.

'Maryon's now set up a foundation to raise

'awareness of the dangers of legal highs.'

I couldn't let Hester die in vain

and so I felt that I needed to campaign

to get GBL banned at the time, and I just feel like every day

the Angelus Foundation, which it's now called,

is making a big difference

and every day Hester is achieving her goal and saving lives.

'GBL has now been made illegal

'and possession can get you up to two years in prison.'

But this is small comfort to those who've lost a much-loved

family member and friend.

In just one night...

..one lapse of being careful,

this incredible girl died, just gone.

And now all that's left of her is some amazing memories, some. .

..really devastated family and friends and a bench.

When I see memorial benches I think of really old people.

Acute respiratory failure usually happens in elderly patients

hit by heart failure or lung disease.

But Hester suffered it at just 1, from taking a drug with alcohol

I'm going back to my trusted source Dr John

to see what he can tell me.

How strong is GBL?

Most people call it G. It's an industrial solvent,

so it can be used in lots of products.

It's used in things like floor cleaners

and nail varnish remover pads and it's sold as an alloy wheel cleaner.

Why is it that if you take a lot of G you go into a coma,

you become unconscious?

It's just a central nervous system depressant,

and if you take too much,

it just depresses your nervous system

to such an extent you become unconscious.

Although now illegal, GBL is still very popular on London's gay scene.

It's such a normal sight now to see people on dance floors

in gay clubs just passed out, and, like, the medic room is always full

and it's going as far as people are dying from this drug

I've experienced friends that have passed out

because they've done too much of it.

Antidote, the UK's gay and lesbian drug and alcohol service,

has reports of around 60 deaths since 2007

that are probably down to G.

It's predominantly used in the saunas

and on the gay scene for sexual activity.

It's a nice feeling, it's enjoyable,

it's just fucking dangerous.

There are so many different ways

for young people to get completely smashed.

There's a strange irony that,

in trying to go out and have a wild and fun time,

some of these young people are suffering

lung and heart problems

that pensioners normally have to deal with.

It seems like a very high price to pay for a good time.

Is it really worth it?

But there does appear to be hope for those who can

kick their drug-taking habit.

28-year-old Vicky has now been clean for three months.

Since going there and talking to Dr Dymond, it's really made me evaluate

my life and it made me think that my heart is so important to me,

and keeping it healthy is the way to live longer and to keep young.

Why go out and purposely age yourself?

There's people that are older

that are trying to make themselves look younger,

and the younger people are trying to age themselves,

it just doesn't make sense, it's ridiculous.

Vicky is now in treatment for her addiction at the Basement Project

drug and alcohol service in Halifax.

The Basement Project's been a really big part of me being clean.

I think if it weren't for this place, I probably wouldn't be here today.

Well, these are all to help you, if you stop drinking as well, you know.

I know it's not easy, I've done it meself.

But I was once like you, I didn't think I could stop.

Oh, yeah, I were t'same, didn't wash me hair,

never had any make-up on, I were terrible.

I did it, you can do it.

Since filming, Jodie has stopped smoking cannabis

and has joined a gym.

And she's spending more quality time with her son

and her boyfriend Sean.

Chris has moved to Romania to live with his dad.

He's been clean for 18 months, and he attends online meetings

every night to help him stay off the drugs.

And Dave is still taking ketamine occasionally,

on perhaps eventually giving up completely.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd