Alex Phillips: We need to talk about spiking

It wasn’t a story. And then it was. And yet it always had been.

The truth is, spiking went nowhere. It’s only that we had simply stopped talking about it, with so many other pernicious and alarming cultural horrors culminating to brush it under the carpet in a society where sexual liberation and narcotics normalisation eclipse and undermine incidents of horrific violation. Most girls know by the age they start going to nightclubs to never leave a drink unattended. Companies have even brought out litmus style tests to detect whether a drink has been spiked. And so the perpetrators have apparently changed tack. Recent months have seen an explosion in reports of victims, largely women, being injected with something on a night out, with varying reports of the subsequent effects. All of them have one thing in common, a clear indication that a needle had pierced the skin.

Yet the first few reported incidents were casually dismissed, with headlines such as ‘Experts say scenario is Far-Fetched’ in the Scottish Herald, ‘Injection Spiking is Likely Rare, so why are we all so scared’ in The New Statesman, while The Mirror described one victim as a ‘hysterical teenager’, and the Daily Mail asked ‘Did All Those Nightclub Needle Attacks Actually Ever Happen?’ Even now when you google injection spiking, the first link is to the BBC news website with the headline asking, ‘Injection Spiking: How Likely Is It?’. I dunno. Maybe the fact that hoards of women across the country are exhibiting red injection sites while many have been hospitalised with terrifying symptoms would suggest to me very likely indeed, or else all of these women are deranged liars. And you wonder why so many victims of rape are afraid of coming forward in fear of not being believed or being ridiculed?

Yet this isn’t just affecting women. An internet search reveals a host of men also reporting attacks, and let’s not forget that the most prolific drug rapist the world has ever seen preyed upon young straight males in Manchester, counting as many as 280 victims over 12 years, although Reynhard Srinaga would lure his victims back to his apartment offering help to drunk and disoriented party goers to then ply them with date rape drugs and seriously sexually abuse them.

But ask most women today or members of the gay community whether they think they have ever been spiked and you may be shocked at how many have strong suspicions that they have. Among my friends, the trend is horrifying, with one even believing she was drugged at an event in Parliament. The difficulty is when alcohol is involved, doubt creeps in, and the victim starts to question the chain of events, with so much condemned to memory loss, a trait, of course, of the drugs used in most spikings.

Just two days ago, a report in the Yorkshire Post told of two women in their twenties taken to hospital fitting and foaming at the mouth, with blood tests revealing substances produced as a reaction to illegal drugs and evidence of puncture marks on their backs.

I remember aged 18 calling my parents from a phone box in Cheltenham, disorientated, afraid and unable to talk with saliva running down my chin. Lord knows how my Dad found me and conveyed me to A&E. So how, twenty years later, is this problem still out of control? Today, we really need to talk about spiking.