An award-winning technician died with more than 30 times as much ketamine in his body as a typical recreational dose.
Rian Rogers, 26, collapsed in his shower within minutes of snorting an illicit batch of the anaesthetic, which is growing in popularity as a drug among young Britons. His fatal overdose caused a similar degree of blood poisoning to that suffered by the Friends actor Matthew Perry, who died in his Hollywood hot tub after abusing ketamine.
Fiona Gingell, the coroner at his inquest, described Rogers’s death as “an absolutely tragic loss of life in a young man who clearly had a very bright and promising future”.
Rogers, who won two national awards at Jaguar Land Rover and was starting a degree course in computer engineering, had been fighting for years to overcome his addiction. When he died he was in need of surgery to his bladder, ravaged by ketamine cystitis. He had been waiting more than 18 months for specialist NHS pain treatment.
Rogers had been unlucky to have been sold an unusually strong batch of ketamine, Dr Stephen Morley, a toxicologist from University Hospital Leicester, told the inquest at Nottingham coroner’s court.
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Someone misusing ketamine “for its pleasurable effects” would tend to have less than 100 nanograms per millilitre of blood. Levels above 200 would be enough to put a person to sleep. Rogers had a reading of 3,212, a “very high level, even in somebody who is highly tolerant, likely to cause them to go to sleep and stop breathing”.
Bags of the illicit drug could contain between 0 and 100 per cent ketamine “depending who he has bought it from” and how much chalk dust, talcum powder or cutting agent had been added.
“It’s likely that he has taken what he thinks is a normal dose but it’s ten or twentyfold more potent. He has just been unlucky. He has unfortunately taken a dose which is far in excess to what his body is used to,” Morley said.
Rogers needed an en-suite bathroom in his shared house in Nottingham because of his bladder problems. He had time after taking the drug to get into his shower but “in the concentration we have seen it’s likely to have been very quick that he went to sleep”.
The student’s father Mike Cavanagh, attending the inquest by video link from his home in Spain, asked Morley about his son’s final moments.
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The toxicologist replied: “He didn’t know he was dying. Most of us don’t go into the shower thinking we are going to die. Unfortunately he has collapsed in the shower. He was likely unconscious and in a very deep sleep and knew nothing of what was happening.”
When Perry died in October he was also found to have more than 3,000 nanograms of ketamine in his blood, described at the time as enough for a general anaesthetic.
Ian Ellis, a pathology professor from the University of Nottingham who performed a post-mortem examination on Rogers, found that the student’s brain was damaged as a result of ketamine suppressing his breathing and depriving it of oxygen.
Rogers left his job as an electrical technician with Jaguar Land Rover to become a computer technician. He worked at Experian and had enrolled in a BSc course at Nottingham Trent University. He moved into a shared house in the city’s Beeston district on April 2, 2023.
Detective Constable Lauren Carpenter said housemates alerted police that they found his body on the evening of April 24. He was in a seated position in the shower, which was still running. He was last seen eating a pie in the communal kitchen on the Friday, chatting and socialising.
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Rogers had been snorting ketamine for four years before he realised from doing research on the internet that it could be to blame for the pain and frequency of his need to urinate, according to evidence from his family’s GP surgery in Atherstone, Warwickshire, read out by the coroner.
The young man had struggled to quit the drug and his family paid for him to go into general rehab but he kept relapsing. His mother, Clare Rogers, a 47-year-old midwife who is campaigning for ketamine to be upgraded to a class A drug from class B, fought back tears to tell the coroner: “I want to make other people aware of how dangerous this drug is. I am going to do everything I can because that’s what he deserved. He wouldn’t have wanted this.”
His father came close to breaking down as he told the coroner that there was no help available for ketamine addicts. He said his son had “lived with us for nine months. He put on weight, he was healthy. The thing we found really hard was when we wanted to pay for him to go private, we couldn’t get a therapist. There was none available. In the end he just left and that was it”.
The assistant coroner said: “This was an accidental overdose. He was desperately trying to take positive steps forward and that was being done with the support of his loving family.” She recorded a verdict of drug-related death.
After the inquest his mother said: “There’s a misconception that this drug is relatively safe. However the death of Rian proves differently. This drug is powerful and should not be messed with in an uncontrolled environment.”
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An investigation by The Times last year disclosed that 41 students had died with ketamine in their bodies. Rogers brings that toll to 42.
