Vape Spiking – Smoke Without Fire?

A new danger for festival and party-goers emerged this summer – vape spiking. A stranger approaches a young woman and asks if she wants have a go on his vape, something that young people often do to try new flavours. Soon after the victim becomes dizzy, nauseous and loses control of her body before passing out…

She has been vape-spiked.

Vape spiking was reported across the media as a worrying new trend, a new weapon in the armoury of the innumerable spikers said to haunt the nightclubs and festivals of the world. Not content with spiking drinks with knock out drops, these invisible maniacs recently turned to stabbing women in nightclubs with syringes dripping with date rape drugs. And now they’re targeting you with spiked vapes…

Or are they?

Entire Body Shut Down

The vape spiking panic seems to have started when Chloe Hammerton, a 26 year old emergency care assistant, was at the Isle of Wight music festival this June with her partner, her brother and his girlfriend. She was in a queue for food with her group when a man approached her and encouraged her to try his vape.

Within a minute she was in and out of consciousness and unable to speak or move. She told the presenters of Good Morning Britain that the world seemed to go into slow motion, she felt pins and needles before collapsing into seizures, vomiting and suffering from incontinence.

Chloe and her partner say they waited for two hours for adequate medical help from the festival, though the festival authorities deny this. Neither the festival medics nor Southampton police (where they reported the next day) tested her for drugs. The implication is that the festival and the police thought that Chloe had simply drunk too much.

Chloe and her family and friends contacted the media and her experience was widely reported. She appeared on Good Morning Britain along with former Love Island star and anti-spiking campaigner Sharon Gaffka and answered some questions about what happened to her. In discussing the motive for the attack, one presenter noted that it was extraordinary that someone would spike Chloe with a vape in broad daylight and in a busy public place with lots of witnesses who might identify him.

And this is one reason for scepticism. If your aim is to sexually assault or rob someone, incapacitating them in a public place when they are surrounded by friends is not a rational strategy. A drug that leads to vomiting and incontinence of the victim is unlikely to be conducive to a sexual assault. There is also a good chance that the attacker would be seen and caught. It doesn’t make sense.

Another supposed victim of vape-spiking was Emma Sugrue-Lawrence. She got talking to a man in the smoking area of a club in Wolverhampton and she gave him her vape to try. The man went to the toilet, and when he returned she asked for the vape back. However, soon after using it, she started to feel unwell and she lost control of her legs before her whole body shut down and she could not move. Emma was taken to hospital but discharged herself before she was given a drug test. She believes she had been spiked with Mamba, a synthetic cannabinoid that she thinks might have been sprayed around the base of her vape.[i]

Now, it’s certainly possible that the vaping liquid was contaminated in these two episodes. Or perhaps these women had a reaction to nicotine or some other compound in the vape. Maybe they were drunk or on drugs (they were in places known for such things). Or perhaps they had a panic attack. The least likely explanation is a malevolent man intent on publicly drugging innocent women for no apparent reason.

So what’s going on?

Yes, it’s Hysteria…

We’re in the early stages of a hysterical phantom attacker panic. This panic is a new variant of needle spiking hysteria of recent years when young women (and some men) in nightclubs were allegedly injected with drugs by mysterious men without being aware of it. The victims would suddenly begin to feel intoxicated, dizzy and suffer from loss of memory and perhaps unconsciousness. The next day they might find a small scratch or puncture on their skin. The conclusion they drew was that a maniac had drugged them with a syringe, for what nefarious purpose is never really made clear.

However, no drugs have been found in the blood of needle-spiking victims and no charges have been brought, despite the supposed attacks taking place in busy public spaces often well-served with cameras. Add to this the fact that jabbing someone in a crowded place, holding the syringe still long enough for the drugs to be injected and then withdrawing the needle without being seen and without the victim noticing is practically impossible.[ii] We might also note that the symptoms of being spiked (nausea, loss of balance, vomiting….) are also symptoms of having drunk too much.

Phantom attacker panics occur when there is a background of free-floating anxiety. Anxiety makes people more vigilant for threats in their environment and more alert to what’s happening in their own body, which results in breathing too hard, increased heartbeat and panic as a fight or flight reaction takes place. Add drink and drugs to the mix and you have a heady cocktail. As nightclubs opened again after covid lockdowns, many young people would have felt anxiety about catching the virus given the deliberately frightening government fear campaign of the previous two years. They may also have felt guilt in that by partying in a club and then catching the virus, they could pass it on to a vulnerable loved one. Concern about the effect of the vaccine on young people may also have played a part – the syringe symbolising this.

All these elements combined to create a perfect hysterical storm, and a phantom attacker panic was created. The needle spiking delusion began in Britain and then spread to Europe and then around the world.

Although it seemed that needle spiking was a shocking new crime, it’s actually a hysteria with some pedigree. In the early twentieth century it was believed that sinister organisations were spiking young women with needles with the intention of whisking them away to a life of sex slavery in a South American bordello.[iii] In the late twentieth century, there were panics in many parts of the world when it was believed that AIDS patients were deliberately jabbing innocent people in nightclubs with syringes full of HIV contaminated blood.[iv] However, NONE of these needle wielding monsters ever existed. They were urban legends – phantoms.

With the emerging vape spiking panic, the background anxiety may be the concern about potential harmful effects of vaping. There have been several worrying newspaper stories of contaminated (possibly black market) vapes with users, including children, collapsing after using them.[v]

A Warning about Warnings

Young vapers are already being warned about this new danger of vape sharing and the ‘symptoms’ of spiking to look out for.[vi]

But here’s the thing. Warning people about spiking doesn’t stop it happening, but it does make people more likely to interpret a panic attack, anxiety or being drunk as being spiked. But the evil spiker stalking festivals and nightclubs doesn’t exist. He’s a bogyman. And perpetuating the myth of the maniac spiker by these well-meaning warnings is helping to create the climate of fear in which these hysterical panics develop.

In any case phantom attacker episodes seem to thrive in the autumn for some reason. As new students head for university, they are likely to be given dire warnings about the danger of being spiked – by drink, needle or vape. A new wave of spikings is likely to ripple through the media in October and November as the bogey man returns…

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[i] Jade Biggs, ‘A woman was left paralysed after her vape was spiked on a night out’, Cosmopolitan, August 2023, available at: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a37440817/woman-paralysed-vape-spiked/

[ii] Robert Bartholomew and Paul Weatherhead ‘Poking Holes in Needle-Spiking: Nightclub “Attacks” Scare Sweeps Europe’, The Skeptic, (January 2023) available at: https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/nightclub-needle-spiking-attacks-scare-sweeps-europe/

[iii] Bartholomew and Weatherhead (2023)

[iv] Timothy Corrigan Correll, ‘You Know about Needle Boy, Right?”: Variation in Rumors and Legends about Attacks with HIV-Infected Needles’, Western Folklore , 67, (1) (Winter, 2008), pp. 59-100;  Jun Jing, ‘The Social Origin of AIDS Panics in China’ in AIDS and Social Policy in China edited by Joan Kaufman, Arthur Kleinman, and Tony Saich (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006) pp.152-169

[v] Charles Harrison, Daily Express 21 July 2023; https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/the-living-dead-fight-in-front-of-kids-in-city-labelled-spice-capital-of-the-north/ar-AA1eARyR?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=8443d50d63e24cbf9bd071069ef77097&ei=42

[vi] Charlotte Grey, Festival-goers at Boardmasters being given help to avoid drink and vape spiking at the festival, 13 August 2023, available at: https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2023-08-13/festival-goers-being-helped-to-avoid-spiking-at-boardmasters