It almost doesn't matter if the needle injections turn out to have happened or not. The fact is that young women are on such high alert about their own safety, so hyper-aware that every time they go on a night out there's a chance it could end badly for them or one of their friends, that they believe it could happen. They have internalised the fact that they are in a group (young women) that is at very high risk of being targeted to be drugged without their knowledge or consent, and with incredibly low risk of being caught or facing consequences for the perpetrator.
Conclusions: Most patients allegedly having had a spiked drink test negative for drugs of misuse. The symptoms are more likely to be a result of excess alcohol.
I cannot express how angry this makes me.
SPIKING DOES HAPPEN. I have 3 daughters, aged 26 to 19. The two younger ones have both been spiked, one of them twice. The oldest hasn't been spiked herself, but had to look after her 2 friends when they were spiked on a Halloween night out at university. That experience - being responsible for getting 2 girls vomiting and unable to stand home, when no taxi would take them because of the vomiting - traumatised her enough to put her off going to nightclubs and she's never been to one since. (Incidentally, she's pretty certain that the spiking was done by bar staff as they'd only just arrived at the club and hadn't had close contact with anyone else.)
That was in 2015 and spiking has got way, way more widespread and commonplace since then. The fact that a report from 2007 when the internet was still in its infancy and there were no platforms like snapchat and WhatsApp for the easy procurement of drugs, gives an accurate picture of what the situation is now is laughable.
My youngest was spiked at pre-drinks in a friend's flat, by someone who must have been in that circle of about 20 friends. It was at the start of the evening. She hadn't had 'excess alcohol' - she'd only just arrived.
In none of the cases my daughters were involved in did anyone report what happened or go to hospital for toxicology tests. What would have been the point? There is no interest in finding the perpetrators. The police were hardly going to leap into action, trawling through hours of CCTV to see if it was caught on camera. And of course, there is a very good chance that they wouldn't even have been believed. If posters on a parenting website assume young women who claim to have been spiked have probably just had more to drink than they thought, what chance have they got of being believed by the police? The recorded statistics we have on this are a drop in the ocean.
Yes, young women are scared. But that's because they've been responsible for their own safety and policing it for themselves for years. Any sense of an additional, even more random threat is going to be the tipping point for many, not because they're silly little airheads running around getting hysterical over an unlikely rumour, but because they are TIRED of this bullshit. What the hell do women have to do to protect themselves, and what will it take to wake society up from its indifference to their safety?
The whole issue needs urgent and intense scrutiny. If the needle stories are what brings this about, that's one good thing. From what I'm seeing though, it seems depressingly more likely to make people even more ready to dismiss young women as making it up.