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Gosh that makes me angry, for a few reasons actually. 1. where were that woman's FRIENDS who are supposed to have her back? 2. what happened? did that weird scary fat nosebreaking man go to JAIL? 3. it's because of stories like this that certain excellent recreational drus are Schedule 1 (i.e. very illegal) in the US and that's sort of a damned shame too.
1. where were that woman's FRIENDS who are supposed to have her back?
I've read several stories like this one and in many cases, the ones slipping the pills in the drink are actually friends of the said friends. The victim usually notices that her drink tastes strange, but these friends (or friends of friends) assure her that it's ok.
How awful. That's why they say you should never leave your drink unattended. It's not the sort of thing you'd really think about, though, especially not when out with friends.
I'm always shocked in the UK that women I just met will leave their drink with me when going to the bathroom. I'm totally trustworthy but they don't know that yet! I don't remember this happening in the U.S., but maybe I just didn't drink that much then.
Someone dosed my drink once, back in the late 80s. I was lucky--I managed to ride it out in the club, where the staff and other people knew me--but it was one of the scariest nights of my life. I think he'd misjudged my size, incredible stubbornness and...er...drug experience, so I didn't actually pass out, absolutely refused to leave the table, and managed to ask one of the waitresses to call an ambulance. (Well, I managed to sit up and say "ambulance" a few times.) She didn't (she couldn't hear me and he assured her I was okay), but they kept a sharp eye on the table after that and it would've been difficult if not impossible to force a 5'11", 160 lb woman to leave if I didn't want to. I didn't leave my drink unattended--I was drinking beer out of the bottle and took it onto the dance floor with me--but he did buy a round and bring it back to the table, which is when he must have slipped the drug in. At 18 I was too worried about appearing rude to refuse the drink, and probably too sure of my own invincibility. I never made that mistake again. I wouldn't have dreamed of going to the cops, for fear of encountering that same attitude, especially toward an underage teenaged punk clubgoer. (The cops in TO at the time were notorious for beating up punks for fun, and were not noted for their sensitivity.)
I found out later that the guy in question did it to someone else, and was taking her back to his place when she realized what was happening and managed to force him to let her out on the side of the road. Minutes later he had an accident and is now paralyzed from the waist down. Ah, delicious irony.
The way this situation played out is horrifying, but sadly I don't find it all that surprising. It does appal me that some police still have that kind of attitude, when so much is known about date rape drugs and about rape in general. I wish her the best of luck in the hard road ahead of her.
This happened to a (male) friend of a friend in Vancouver, CA. He was at a bar one evening, and woke up the next day at home. He was a little freaked out by that, but assumed he'd just overindulged and gotten home somehow.
Several months later, his sight suddenly failed. He went to the doctor and was told he'd contracted syphilis (which affected his sight- it returned when he was treated) and that he was also now HIV+. To this day he doesn't know who did it to him.
but he did buy a round and bring it back to the table, which is when he must have slipped the drug in.
Oh, my.
That absolutely chills me. I've always been pretty vigilant about not leaving a drink sitting around, which is hard enough when your favorite song starts playing and you want to jump up and dance, but it honestly never occurred to me that (duh) someone could tamper with a drink on the way back from the bar.
In fact, I'm an uptight prig who has never let a stranger buy her a drink, so it's not directly relevant to me, but I'm trying to instill some street-smarts in my teenaged niece, to augment what her parents have taught her, and this gap in the advice makes me wonder what other gaps we've left unfilled.
I had a friend at work once who liked to socialize with co-workers over a glass of wine or two after work -- very platonic, at least for me, as I liked her okay but had a marriage I wanted to work on. She was in a failing marriage herself and was dabbling with the idea of meeting new people, the way folks in that status often will, so I imagine she was putting out receptive vibes.
During one such "happy hour" I didn't attend, she was drinking and got slipped something -- possibly rohypnol, possibly something else; I'm not up on the pharmacopeia -- and barely or very nearly raped (depending on how you interpret technicalities) by another co-worker when out for after-work drinks, as she related later.
I made VERY sure she understood that I suspected whom it was and that I'd better not find out for sure. And then later that day, I gave the probable miscreant -- one of our newest (less than a week at this point) sales guys -- my best Mark One Mod Zero withering, lingering, suspicious stare. He instantly had trouble looking me in the eye. All nonverbal, but I'm sure we nevertheless spoke volumes to each other. And he disappeared from the job soon after.
Is meanoldmommy one who says :"I'm not a feminist...but" until it happens to one of her own? GODDAMNIT, THESE WARNINGS HAVE BEEN CIRCULATING FOR YEARS!!!! Women are people first! It is our right to go wherever we fucking well please, at whatever time of day, dressed however we like and be left alone. We may well go to bars to hang out with friends or try an interesting cocktail; not to be accosted by a cretinous binge drinker who is desperate to get laid....we may well be at clubs for the sake of dancing; not to be poisoned by some smegma who would be better off using a blow-up doll.
This happened to a friend of mine too. She was at a conference, and another one of the conference attendees slipped something into her drink. She woke up in a hotel bed with this man, a doctor, who seemed completely happy with what he'd done. She ran out, and a combination of fear and the drugs meant that she cannot say with any certainty which room it was. So far, legal proceedings have gone badly. The suspected drug was out of her system by the time she got a blood test.
It nearly cost her her marriage and the pschological effects were devastating. She stopped eating for a while and locked herself away. She lost a great job, and it took a while for her to get anything like her old spark back. Bad things happen, but this one shook me up deeply.
The upsetting thing is that rohypnol is still considered by so many to be a joke. I see it on the TV, on the internet and just in normal conversation. I hate to imagine what women affected by this terrible crime feel when they read comments on such as metafilter which pretty much say "Rohypnol - Drug women and then fuck them while they sleep - LOL".
(Not that Metafilter is any better or any worse than other places, it's just where I see it the most)
I got slipped a mickey at a joint called Lolita's on Broome St. at Allen St. on the Lower East Side a couple years ago.
It was my first beer of the night, and I tasted it immediately; my upper lip became numb on contact with the beer. It made the beer feel in my mouth like fiberglass mixed with some gel of some sort -- a kind of piri-piri feeling -- and I was slightly nauseated.
I thought it might have been detergent left on a poorly-washed glass, so I brought it back to the bartender and demanded another beer, which I got, and drank a couple sips of before I felt so bad that I said goodbye to my friends and headed home.
The next thing I knew, I was in my apartment (at the time I was living at Clinton St. and E. Broadway, so it wasn't too far), in my bed, sunlight streaming in the window, my roommate banging on my door: "Hugh, are you alright?"
"Yeah, man, go away; I just drank something funny last night."
"You need some water?"
"No, sleep."
Several hours later, once I was awake and a little less trembly, my roommate told me he became concerned when he came in and smelled me in the apartment. He said it smelled like a room full of sick people, like warm clammy skin and hair, bile and soup, as if a bunch of fluids were being forced out of my body from the inside.
I tend to think I got a poorly-washed glass from someone else's mickey, since I had just arrived at the bar and my beer never left my hand. It doesn't make sense for the bartender to have tried to drug me, since there was no advantage to be taken from behind the bar.
It's possible, too, that it was something else, some poison that found its way into my glass some other way, like leftover detergent (though that stuff is meant to taste and smell a certain way, be non-toxic and all). I'm glad I only had a little to drink; I'm a pretty big guy but a whole glass full of that stuff might have put me in a coma.
I've always wondered, if I'm right about it being someone else's leftover mickey, if it worked on them, and who did it. It's frightening, and random, and I think there should be very mild penalties for people who track down those who drug them like this and beat them to death.
At least the law doesn't laugh at rape here. Not that things are perfect, or that we don't have a long way to go until everyone respects how awful it is, but at least there is some recourse for victims.
Yeah, like I said, not that things are perfect, or that we don't have a long way to go until everyone respects how awful it is, but at least there is some recourse for victims.
Rape in general is still considered by so many to be a joke. It's a charming society we live in, sometimes.
Yeah. "Don't drop the soap" jokes have really started to anger me recently. Oh ha ha ha people are getting raped in prison and no one does anyting about it. Very funny.
Sigh. I got into a huge fight about date rape with my little brother the last time I went home. He insisted that date rape didn't happen at Princeton, EVER (he's a senior). I called bullshit and he insisted that I didn't know what I was talking about, that the administration would never let it happen, that people wouldn't do that here, etc. etc. I don't even know what to do with him any more. It pisses me off, and I don't know how to get through.
A 'friend' of a friend drugged my drink about three years ago. There was a large group of people out for my friend's birthday and this guy, J was one of them. He had been talking me up all night and seemed nice, but this was the first time I met him. I ordered my drink and left about half of it it with J while I went to the bathroom. I finished my drink when I got back and started feeling sick to my stomach pretty quickly afterward. I know I wasn't drunk - it was my first drink of the night! I went back to the bathroom to splash some water on my face and pee again. Sitting in the stall, I blacked out. I'm so glad I went to tbe bathroom when I did - so I wasn't with J when it happened.
My friends did look for me. They took me back to the birthday girl's apartment. Unfortunately, J came back to the apartment with us and planned to stay the night. I felt so sick that I didn't care where I slept, I was struggling to keep my eyes open and stay away from J. I ended up sleeping on an air mattress in the middle of my friend's kitchen. I woke up later to find J and his busy hands on the mattress with me. I don't remember much more after that.
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