Blurred vision and dirty thoughts
Feel out of place, very distraught
Feel something coming on….
‘Somebody Put Something in my Drink’ (The Ramones)
In every bar and every club they lurk, lying in wait for their helpless innocent victim. Concealed in their hands are vials of potent date rate drugs, and the minute the victim leaves her drink unattended, the odourless, colourless narcotic is deftly splashed into their glass…
One sip is all it takes. This is soon followed by dizziness, nausea, loss of inhibitions, slurred speech and memory blackouts… The drink spiking bogeyman has struck again. They are legion, we are told, and no woman – or man – is safe from them.
In fact, a UK study of university students revealed that over half of them knew someone who had been spiked.[i]
Drink spiking returned to the UK national headlines again in late February 2024 after journalist Kate McCann revealed her experience. She was in a London bar with some work colleagues when one of her companions said she thought she’d seen a man put something in their drinks while they were at the bar. Unfortunately, McCann had by this time already had a sip.
Shortly after McCann began feeling hot and strange and she realised something was wrong. She went to the toilet where she could not stand or even sit straight. She was, however, able to phone a taxi and get home. She woke the next day on her bathroom floor with no memory of what had happened.[ii]
McCann couldn’t understand the motive for the spiking. Nobody tried to separate her from her group. There was no attempt at sexual assault or robbery. The men she suspected of spiking her were brazen, putting the drug into her drink and not caring if anyone saw them.
Kate McCann, you might remember, was the journalist who famously fainted while chairing a Conservative Party leadership debate between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss in 2022.[iii] Of course, chairing such a debate might cause anyone to lose consciousness.
But it leads to an uncomfortable question: if McCann had a funny turn live on TV, could something similar have happened in the London bar? Could a mistaken observation by her friend have led to a nocebo effect – a negative placebo – where the unpleasant symptoms are caused by the expectation that something bad was about to happen?
The Evidence
A number of studies have tested those who claim to have been spiked. They show the vast majority of people who think their drink has been drugged are wrong. An Australian study examined the blood of 97 people who reported to a hospital saying they had been spiked. Guess how many of that sample actually had any sedative or other drug (aside from narcotics knowingly taken) in their system? That’s right. None of them.[iv]
A similar study in Wales tested 75 mostly female patients who had presented to a hospital A&E department claiming their drink had been spiked. The tests showed that while many of the patients had certainly had a lot to drink, and quite a few had ingested various recreational drugs, none of them had been actually been spiked.[v]
Other studies have similar results.[vi] People who turn up at casualty departments thinking they have been spiked seem to have no drug in their system (other than ones they had taken voluntarily).
Furthermore, the notion that nasty men hang around in bars waiting to spike innocent women for no apparent purpose just doesn’t make much sense. For one thing, witnesses are everywhere, as is CCTV. For another, assuming the alleged spiking is to facilitate a sexual assault, dragging a barely conscious victim away from her friends, out of the club and through the streets is likely to be challenging and to attract attention. If you’ve ever had to carry a drunk friend home from a night out, you’ll know what I mean.
As drink spiking expert Pamela Donovan points out, if someone is going to spike you for malicious purposes, they are likely to do it in a private rather than a public space and they are probably known and trusted by the victim.[vii]
Finally, if drink spiking is so common, why aren’t our jails bursting with the villains? Nightclubs are full of potential witnesses and CCTV cameras are everywhere. Police have investigated thousands of alleged spiking cases – 6,670 between 2017 and 2021 – and only 130 of these resulted in a charge. This survey, conducted by the Independent, does not actually tell us how many were eventually convicted, though it does say that some of these charges were for other offences to the one initially brought against the defendant.[viii] And we don’t know how many of these cases actually took place in a public place such as a nightclub.
One police force, Avon and Somerset, recorded that from 2016 to 2021, there were 486 cases of drink spiking investigated, resulting in 27 arrests but no convictions.[ix]
So what’s going on?
Well, if the vast majority of people who think they have been spiked haven’t, there are several other possibilities to consider.
First, perhaps the victim had not kept track of how much she was drinking, or had a bad reaction to drugs (prescription, illicit or both) she had voluntarily taken. This bad reaction might mistakenly be assumed to be symptoms of spiking – about which everyone has heard the scare stories. And as an excuse for being inebriated, being spiked would certainly gain more sympathy than having knocked back one too many. As Pamela Donovan puts it, it’s a kind of redemptive tragic magic.[x] A drink spiking story instantly conjures up archetypes of damsels in distress and dastardly villains.
This brings us to the second possibility – that the victim made the story of being spiked up to gain attention or sympathy. This may sound unlikely, but it’s certainly something that happens. A famous case is the Halifax Slasher panic of 1938 when dozens of victims in Halifax and then hundreds more around the country claimed to have been attacked by a razor blade wielding maniac. It turned out that the victims had cut themselves and invented the story of the attack.[xi]
Being spiked confers on one sympathy, victimhood status and also suggests that the victim is so irresistible that dastardly villains will do anything to get their hands on them.
A third possibility is that the victim suffered a panic or anxiety attack and then became hypervigilant about the state of their body such that a nocebo effect occurs and the mind did the rest and created the symptoms. In other words, what psychiatrists of a bygone age would call a hysterical reaction.
Another way of looking at drink spiking is as a culture bound syndrome. In Nigeria, penis stealing panics occur regularly. Typically, a man brushes past another in the street and then suddenly grasps his privates and screams that his penis has been stolen. He may feel that it is shrinking, vanishing into his abdomen leading him to panic – assuming that black magic has been employed to rob him of his manhood to be used for witchcraft. Anyone suspected of being a penis thief is likely to be beaten up or even killed. A major epidemic of penis theft, or koro as it is sometimes known, occurred in Nigeria at the in 2023.[xii] They often happen at times of heightened anxiety.
These penis panics seem crazy to western eyes and it’s hard to make sense of them when looking from outside the culture they occur in.
I think the drink spiking panics are the western equivalent of Nigerian penis theft panics – a kind of cultural delusion.
Of course, anyone who thinks they have been spiked should seek help and be taken seriously. But the notion that spiking is common and that gangs of malicious men are spiking innocent women for no particular purpose is an urban legend. A myth. A prudish but well-meaning scare story whose message seems to be the world is too dangerous a place for defenceless little girls. They should be at home where they belong. There is something of paternalistic Victorian sexism about the drink spiking panic.
We’ve had plague, war, inflation, climate doom-mongering and God knows what else relentlessly over the last few years. Constant free floating anxiety creates the ideal conditions for hysteria. People become hypervigilant about their body, and their mind and the nocebo effect does the rest. We should dial down the rhetoric about drink spiking. It’s rare, in public at any rate. More precautions, warnings and horror stories will only lead to more cases of alleged spikings.
The people who think they’ve been spiked by a stranger on a night out most probably haven’t.
Like the Halifax Slasher and the Nigerian Penis Thief, the sinister drink spiker haunting every bar and club belongs in the realm of fiction.
For more spiking panics, see below:
[i] Burgess, A., Donovan, P. and Moore, S. (2009). ‘Embodying Uncertainty? Understanding Heightened Risk Perception of Drink “Spiking”’, British Journal of Criminology 49 (pp.848-862)
[ii] McCann describes her experience here
[iv] Paul Quigley et al (2009) ‘Prospective study of 101 patients with suspected drink spiking’, Emergency Medicine Australia, 21(3) pp.222-228 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1742-6723.2009.01185.x
[v] Hughes, H.et al (2007) ‘A Study of Patients Presenting to an Emergency Department having had a Spiked Drink’, Emergency Medicine Journal, 24 (pp.89-91)
[vi] See Bendau, A. et al ‘Spiking Versus Speculation? Perceived Prevalence, Probability, and Fear of Drink and Needle Spiking’, Journal of Drug Issues https://doi.org/10.1177/00220426231197826
[vii] Donovan, P. Drink Spiking and Predatory Drugging (Palgrave Macmillan: 2016)
[viii] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/drink-injection-spiking-offences-charge-b1978121.html
[ix] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Spiking: Ninth Report of Sessions 2021-2022, April 26, 2022, p. 35
[x] Ibid p.81
[xi] See chapter one of my book Weird Calderdale for the full story.
[xii] Ukanwa, E. ‘Here are Abuja mystery genital thieves’, Vanguard, 22 October, 2023
Paul Weatherhead 
One thought on “Spiked or Spooked? The Myth of the Drink Spiking Bogeyman”