Drinking alcohol puts people at high risk for all kinds of misfortunes. Exposure to date-rape drugs, however, doesn’t seem to be one of them.
In a study published in the British Journal of Criminology, more than half of the 200 university students surveyed said they knew someone whose drink had been spiked. But judging from evidence in police and medical records, these numbers are probably highly inflated. For instance, one Australian study of 97 men and women who’d been admitted to an emergency room and claimed their drinks had been spiked found only 9 “plausible” cases. Forensic evidence supported none of those claims; for the most part, the complainants were simply drunk.
Alcohol can be dangerous enough without bringing date-rape drugs into the picture. Drinking is commonly implicated in sexual assault. At least 50 percent of rapes on college campuses are associated with drinking, among both perpetrators and victims. Still, too often, fear of a spiked drink outstrips fear of one drink too many.
“Young women appear to be displacing their anxieties about the consequences of consuming what is in the bottle on to rumors of what could be put there by someone else,” said Dr. Adam Burgess, one of the authors of the British study, in an interview with the Telegraph.
Why the displacement? Guarding against drink-spiking can be a proxy for discussions of problem drinking. Or, as Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post about the study: the drink-spiking myth serves as a way for “parents and friends to warn young women of excessive drinking without criticizing their personal choices.”
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It’s a convenient way for girls to protect their reputations when they hook up drunk. If her drink was spiked, then she can’t be a slut.
Hey “Anonymous,”
If a girl hooks up drunk, then she can’t legally consent.
You might want to keep that in mind.
So so true. The cognitive dissonance for a girl who’s other wise in control of herself to see picture of herself the night before, out of control, dancing on tables, hooking up with whoever, and finally, throwing up on the bathroom floor, can be too much to bear.
Explaining it away by blaming roofies is convenient–not just to avoid embarrassment, because I think often girls in that situation in fact believe they got a roofied–but also to reconcile their behavior with their own perception of their classiness and self-control.
you heard it here first: ambien can be used as a date rape drug (not sure of its effects with alcohol)
I wonder what percentage of rapes on college campuses are associated with marijuana use?
(Yes, it’s a rhetorical question)
If the guy hooks up drunk can he consent?
The likelihood of something bad happening when consuming a spiked drink is probably higher then the likelihood when consuming an unspiked (but still alcoholic) drink, mostly ends without major incident. This imbalance probably also results in an existing risk-aversion to consuming possibly spiked drinks and also increased caution when put in possible situations. Not to metion the chance of a story of one or two people with spiked drinks (or someone saying, “Oh, I bet their drink was spiked!”) can spread pretty quickly on a university campus resulting in 100 people saying they “know someone” who has had their drink spiked… whether it was fact or just a rumor.
Given all these factors I’m skeptical that any of the data points mentioned in the above article are really proving anything. Yes there’s much higher incidence and likelihood of foul play due to alcohol than due to spiked drinks. Not only are the social stigmas much different for these two methods of taking advantage of someone, but the risk of getting caught is arguably higher (and the punishment, socially and legally, much worse) for spiking someone’s drink. Add this to the pre-existing caution and you have a society with a high wariness to a particular course of action, already fairly difficult to execute safely, used to take advantage of someone, while alcohol is everywhere, people consume it voluntarily, and “getting someone drunk” can be a fun social event rather than a malicious attempt to violate them.
So I don’t think we can look at the hard data and the nuances and say that drink spiking is any more or less dangerous than consuming too much alcohol when it comes to personal violation. When people are more risk averse to one activity than to another which results in lopsided incidence, we cannot go back and say that people are thus “too” cautious about the one activity since it, presently, doesn’t happen as often.
Or alternatively, it’s an understandable response to a society in which women are lambasted as sluts for choosing to have casual sex, whilst men are not only permitted to do so, but often taught that there’s nothing wrong with encouraging someone who might not know their alcohol tolerance to drink so much that they consent when they otherwise wouldn’t.