USER OF 'PARTY' DRUG IS LEFT A SHELL OF SELF

Health: Erin Rose, 18, Suffered Brain Damage After Taking The Anesthetic
Ketamine. Experts Are Alarmed By Its Growing Popularity.

The tattered photo shows Erin Rose and her boyfriend hugging on the beach.
It was taken before her overdose and the brain damage she now suffers, and
has become a kind of security blanket for her.

But the damage is so severe that Rose, 18, often forgets where she has put
the snapshot. This is one of those times, and it triggers momentary panic
until she finds it in a back pocket.

"He's the one who gave me 'Special K,' " she says, pointing to the smiling
teenager who now goes to college back East. "He's the one who saved my
life. He gave me CPR," she adds, unaware of the irony. The drug that put
Rose in this condition is ketamine, a chemical cousin to PCP that is known
to its users as Special K. It has become increasingly popular in
California's youth rave culture. And casual use of the drug, a powerful
anesthetic used for major surgery on the battlefields of Vietnam, is a
growing concern for law enforcement officials, drug counselors and
emergency-room doctors.

Ketamine can cause respiratory failure and is becoming more widely used as
a "rape drug" because of its quick-acting nature and the inability to
detect it in drinks, authorities said.

"We've never seen this kind of abuse with the drug, and recent research is
showing it's addicting, and that it causes brain damage," said Los Angeles
County sheriff's narcotics Det. Glen Stanley, a club drug expert. "There's
a huge gap between reality and the information the kids in the rave scene
are getting."

Rose, who lives in Laguna Niguel, snorted ketamine with her boyfriend one
night in May at a Newport Beach condo. She had tried it at least once
before at a rave party. Within seconds, as her boyfriend watched
television, Rose's lungs stopped working; her body convulsed. The boy, also
high on the drug, gave her CPR.

But for eight minutes, she did not take a breath. It took three electric
shocks by paramedics to get her heart going again.

The lack of oxygen to her brain caused severe damage. It took two weeks for
her to begin to come out of her coma. It would be a few more weeks before
she could do anything as simple as eat a bowl of pudding. Today, in many
ways, mentally and physically, she has only advanced to the toddler stage.

Rose had been a straight-A student, an honored employee at Starbucks and a
talented athlete. But she also fought depression, had bulimia and
experimented with drugs.

Her parents have only been able to piece together parts of what happened
the night of May 12 from Rose's boyfriend, police and doctors. Many
details, including who actually purchased the ketamine, remain unclear.

"I had gone through in my mind the thought of Erin dying," said her mother,
Maryanne Rose, a former PTA president. She now wants to warn other parents
about the dangers of ketamine.

"I never thought of this in between," she said, "this kind of limbo. The
daughter I knew is dead. She's gone."

Statistics on the use of ketamine are hard to come by because systems in
place track only those who are arrested or who land in the emergency room,
drug experts said.

While there have been ketamine-related arrests throughout California, many
police officers still do not know what the drug is, Stanley said. Its white
powder form makes ketamine difficult to distinguish from more common drugs
such as methamphetamine or cocaine, he said, and the effects displayed by
the user make it easy to mistake for PCP.

Also, it is found almost exclusively in the rave culture, where people hide
it in special compartments built into their pants, hats and shoes. They
also smuggle ketamine into dance parties in sealed candy containers or
dissolved in water bottles.

"Law enforcement on the whole is not really familiar with this rave culture
and how kids are hiding these drugs," Stanley said. "We're starting to do
more training, and word is getting out, but we're always playing catch-up."

But one recent report by the Drug Abuse Warning Network, a project of the
federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, shows
increased use. Although ketamine cases were reported only 19 times in
hospital emergency rooms in 1994, the drug came up 263 times last year.

Still used legally by veterinarians to sedate cats, ketamine is known on
the street, in addition to its "Special K" nickname, as "Vitamin K" or "cat
Valium." In humans, the drug causes hallucinations, delirium, impaired
motor function and, as in Rose's case, respiratory problems that can cause
severe brain damage, even death. From 1994 to 1998, 46 deaths associated
with the drug were reported by 140 medical examiners who participate in the
Drug Abuse Warning Network.

Ketamine comes in liquid form and is cooked in microwaves, on stove tops
and even on car heaters to dry it into powder form for users to snort.

Most of the supply in Southern California is smuggled from Mexico,
according to federal law enforcement authorities. In other parts of the
country, ketamine has been stolen from animal hospitals.

Ketamine has a mix of stimulant, sedative, anesthetic and hallucinogenic
properties, said Ronald K. Siegel, a UCLA psychopharmacologist. It can also
produce severe flashbacks.

"It is a very unusual drug," Siegel said. "It gives you a sense of being
apart and separate, which means you are separated from the pain."

Users have also described the sensation--dubbed a "K-hole"--as an
out-of-body experience, or one in which the rest of the world seems on the
other end of a tunnel.

That quality made it a useful anesthetic during the Vietnam War, especially
for napalm accident victims, Siegel said. And the drug is still used on
humans occasionally in burn wards.

Though new in its popularity among ravers, ketamine has been used as a
recreational drug for decades. Originally known as "green," it was
discovered in the 1960s and '70s--mostly by hard-core drug users--before it
became illegal to possess.

In August 1979, Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor and '60s
psychedelic drug guru who urged his generation to "turn on, tune in and
drop out," was arrested on suspicion of cocaine possession after police
found what turned out to be ketamine in his Beverly Hills apartment.

Twenty years later, in 1999, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
labeled ketamine a controlled substance and listed it as one of the
agency's 14 "drugs of concern."

But the penalties, established in California in 1991 when the local rave
scene was in its infancy, are still not harsh. The law singles out ketamine
possession as only a misdemeanor, while other street drugs, such as
cocaine, carry felony charges.

Though ketamine is rising in popularity, its harder edge still makes it
less attractive to ravers than other drugs such as Ecstasy, LSD, or GHB. In
fact, its presence as a "club drug" has perplexed some experts.

"It's weird that people enjoy a drug that gives them such a bad feeling,"
said Dr. James Keany, an emergency room physician at Mission Hospital
Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, where he has seen young people on
ketamine suffering from anxiety-provoking hallucinations, usually involving
images of death.

Raves--parties marked by thumping, electronic dance music and elaborate
light shows--are tailor-made for drugs like Ecstasy and LSD, which are
perceived as heightening the senses, Stanley said.

Taking ketamine would not make you want to dance, he said, but it fits in
with the culture of the scene. It also attracts users because the high
lasts only about 45 minutes, compared with the effects of LSD or PCP, which
can last several hours.

"The average raver is 14 to 25 years old, and that's the age group that is
very willing to take risks," Stanley said. "Ketamine is a risky drug."

In higher dosages, experts said, the drug can make a person immobile, which
is why ketamine is included among the so-called "rape drugs" such as GHB,
or gamma hydroxybutyrate. There are several known cases of ketamine being
connected with rapes, said Trinka Porrata, a former Los Angeles police
officer often used as an expert witness in club-drug cases.

"Unlike GHB, it doesn't make you unconscious, but you wouldn't be able to
resist an attack and you wouldn't necessarily remember anything that
happened," she said.

And when taken over extended periods of time, ketamine can become
psychologically addictive, drug experts and counselors warn.

"From what I've seen, it's highly addictive," said Jose Rodriguez, a
program counselor with Action, a parent and teen support program with
groups and treatment centers from Hollywood to Ventura. "We have a few kids
in our program battling it right now."

One of them, a 17-year-old Simi Valley boy, said he got hooked on the drug
before many of his peers knew what it was.

At the time, he said, it didn't show up on most basic drug tests. The high
came on quickly, and after taking one hit he said he felt drunk, stoned and
on hallucinogens all at once.

He has been trying to quit the drug for several months, he said, after
three years of staying out all night going to raves and hip-hop parties.
Twice a week, he would drive to Mexico to buy it.

His mother turned him in when she found ready-to-sell packets of the drug
in her son's bedroom last summer. But she did not realize how serious the
problem was until she got involved with Action and drug court.

"He came home pale, sweaty, with eyes glazed, and talking in slow-motion
but not realizing it," she said. "It was terrifying, especially because I
had never heard of this drug."

But the most obvious danger with ketamine, as with all street drugs, is
that doses are unregulated, and users have no idea how much will get them
the high they want, experts said. If the high does not come quickly enough
from one hit, it is common to try another, and another.

In many ways, Erin Rose still looks like a teenager: multicolored beaded
bracelets on her wrists and clothes from Wet Seal and musical tastes that
include the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync.

But she acts and moves like a 4-year-old. She cannot pronounce her Rs and
Ws. She is unsure of how to tell time. She walks with her arms out to her
sides for balance.

The family dynamic has also changed. Her 16-year-old sister, Jessica, has
become a second mom. Her 13-year-old brother, Marshall, has been catapulted
to big-brother status. Erin has regressed to calling her mother "Mommy."

The teenager spends the majority of most days in rehab, trying to
reestablish pathways in her brain. She's learning to talk, walk and make
simple decisions again in hopes that one day she can live independently.

Last month, Rose took a county bus to her all-day rehabilitation center in
Fullerton for the first time. Her mother pinned her return bus fare on her
shirt. Erin threw it away somewhere along the way, thinking it was trash.

"Watching her go on that bus," Maryanne Rose said, "was harder for me than
when she went off to kindergarten.

"It's so frustrating that people don't know what she was really like," she
added, wiping away a tear. "It has been a long road and will continue to
be. I keep hoping to find the good in all of this. I haven't really found
it yet."

Even Erin knows she once had a good life. Or at least a chance at one.

"Now," she said, "I don't know what I have."