Are we really in the midst of a nightclub drug-spiking epidemic? By Stuart Waiton

We don’t know what has happened in these individual cases and drug spiking does occur. But medical experts are now questioning the feasibility of injecting a person without them knowing; the actual difficulty of administering an injection; the specific difficulty of injecting date-rape drugs, the size of the needle that would be needed, and the length of time – up to 20 seconds – that the needle would need to be in the body.

The director of the Global Drug Survey Adam Winstock suggests that there are very few widely accessible drugs that could be used in this way.

Emergency medicine consultant David Caldicott says: “The idea that a clubber would do this to a fellow clubber seems highly unlikely to me”.

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A critical care nurse has suggested that the likelihood of drugs like ketamine being administered is virtually zero. Even in Nottingham where there have been 15 reported cases of needle spiking the police force has identified only one case where the victim’s injury “could be consistent with a needle”.

Hopefully, anyone who has used a needle in this way is caught, convicted, and seriously punished. But we still need to question the extent of the problem, especially as clubs look set to introduce a new stop and search regime based on the anxieties about drug spiking.

If the extent to which we should panic about needle spiking has been questioned, similar questions about drink spiking have also been raised within criminology.

The idea that your drink could be spiked with a date-rape drug is now an accepted idea amongst young women in Scotland, many of whom claim to have either been spiked or to know someone who has been. Considering the apparent scale of this problem, which could rightly be called an epidemic if all these claims are true, it is surprising to find that between 2013 and 2018, the number of convictions for drink spiking in Scotland was zero. Not a single conviction.

As far back as 2009, the British Journal of Criminology published an article that noted the “stark contrast between heightened perceptions of risk…. and a lack of evidence that this is widespread”.

They concluded that the anxiety about drink spiking, that developed in America, had been facilitated by TV soap stories, health agencies and a safety industry that promoted the problem and created what they called a “socialising etiquette”, where young women were essentially educated into a culture of fear.

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Much of the discussion about drink spiking occurs online. This was how the recent Dundee needle spike incident went viral. The pub in which the incident was meant to have occurred initially raising doubts about the case and called the young woman an “alleged victim” rather than simply a victim. The subsequent pile on in social media for not calling the woman a victim forced the pub to change their tune, apologise, and to insist that they will be increasing their security.

Demonstrating their reactive nature, within days of this reported case, Dundee University sent an email out to all students about the “extremely distressing events” that were “unacceptable, reprehensible and ultimately life threatening”.

But without actual evidence of the “ultimately life threatening” cases in question, or a genuine understanding of the scale of the problem, I would suggest that it is the media, politicians and institutions like universities who, by helping to further terrorise young women and escalate the idea that all young men are potential rapists who need to be stopped and search, are behaving in an unacceptable and reprehensible, indeed in a dangerous and reactionary way.

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