Club Drug Experimentation and Trauma

Clubs are hot, sweaty, crowded places full of loud music and flashing lights. They can be wonderfully exciting for young people, who might find the idea of dancing all night with complete strangers to be incredibly liberating. But some teens might be intimidated by the idea of cutting loose in a club, and they might lean on so-called club drugs to wipe away their worries and make the experience a little more intense. Unfortunately, using drugs like this can lead to a significant amount of damage and/or trauma.

Common Club Drugs and Dangers

While almost any drug might be put on sale in a crowded dance club, common offenders are substances that increase euphoria and a sensation of closeness to others. Drugs that are commonly defined as club drugs include:

In some cases, these substances cause physical reactions that send people racing to the emergency room for help. In 2009, for example, the Drug Abuse Warning Network found that about four percent of emergency room visits came about due to the use of Molly. People like this might need help with a racing heartbeat, a sweating body, or seizure-like activity.

Similarly, some people who take ketamine head to the hospital because they have terrible reactions involving hallucinations. They might have visions of impending death, or see threats that others simply cannot see. These people might head to the hospital after harming themselves or threatening to harm others.

Hidden Concerns

While physical side effects of club drugs can be horrific, these drugs can also make users vulnerable to an entirely different type of damage. For example, the National Institute on Drug Abuse suggests that many club drugs cause a form of sedation paired with amnesia. People like this might endure a sexual attack, and they might be unable to provide details about their attackers. They might not even be able to fight back as the attack is unfolding.

Many club drugs are odorless and tasteless, which makes them easy to slide into an unsuspecting person’s drink. A club-goer might emerge from the dance floor feeling hot and thirsty and guzzle a drink in order to cool off, and moments later, that person might be carted away by someone who plans to do that person harm. People like this obviously aren’t choosing to use drugs, but the same effect can take hold in someone who experiments. That person might feel as though the drugs were just for fun, but severe trauma can result from that experimentation.

No matter why the person started using drugs, and no matter what kind of problem took hold after that time, treatment can help. In some cases, people like this benefit from therapies in which they’re allowed to explore all of the negative feelings left behind from a simple case of experimentation, and in other cases, people benefit from therapies in which they explore their drug use habits as a whole, and they learn how to overcome them.

Please call us in order to find out more about facilities that offer treatments for both mental illness and addiction. We have some good solutions available, and we’d like to tell you more about them.