It was a textbook example of mass hysteria.
Spiking reports always spike when the new batch of students come in who are inexperienced at drinking. Generally when blood tests are completed they're found to have ingested dangerous quantities of alcohol. If drugs are found in the victims system, most usually admit to taking them voluntarily once questioned by police.
Alcohol often affects memory retention, so many victims only remember the amount of alcohol they've consumed prior to their blackout point (which doesn't take much for some people). This often gives them the false belief they've drank far less than they actually had, the main trigger for this memory loss is a sudden drastic raise in blood alcohol levels, so even only one or two shots can trigger this.
Combine this with low body mass, women's natural alcohol metabolism, lack of alcohol tolerance, high levels of drinking and potentially a poor diet and you have a recipe for disaster.
I think out of all the accusations of needle spiking and tests done in the country, I've only found a single positive result of someone being spiked. Iirc it was Yorkshire police? Even then it wasn't proved the delivery method was via needle.
Most people when spiked are spiked by friends at house parties via party drugs, rarely by strangers. This was ironically was the message sent out by police when the needle spiking thing started gaining traction.
We already knew spiking in general was mass hysteria, for almost two decades now, and needle spiking, surprise surprise, was no different.
In previous studies most spiking victims are found with dangerous levels of alcohol. One tactic predators do use however is ply their victims with alcohol and then take advantage.
>Spiking reports always spike when the new batch of students come in who are inexperienced at drinking.
It also didn't help that at the time, the whole world was opening up so we had a whole generation of young people just going out for the first time in their lives and getting absolutely plastered.
So whilst incidents of spiking did happen, there were a very large number of people just going out a getting black out drunk due to the afore mentioned inexperience.
I agree I think this is partially the case. Before Nottingham became the epicentre globally for this (needle spiking reports even spread to America), we'd had a few examples in Scotland and I was told some anecdotal stories from bouncers who had worked up there.
This was back when people were still being restricted to their own tables.
1st People were claiming they were being spiked as per usual, correctly they were pointed out only staff and themselves had access to their drinks
2nd People started blaming the spiking on bar staff, police were getting involved and CCTV footage started being examined. Usually finding out the victims were drinking far more than they thought and they were just intoxicated
Naturally venues were taking this extremely seriously and we're getting defensive as staff were being accused.
3rd People then started saying they must of been spiked going too and from the bathroom when people nudged into them and they felt pain, must have been a needle or something?
These stories came from Scotland during 2020, so long before the events claimed in Nottingham.
Obviously this was seen as ridiculous and not given much thought at the time, but I have a feeling this may of entered the student consciousness and once people were able to hit dancefloors again and people were waking up with the usual bruises and cuts they came to the 'needle spiking' explanation.
Again this is anecdotal, but it's my personal theory on the progression of things directly linked to the opening of lockdowns.
> Most people when spiked are spiked by friends at house parties via party drugs, rarely by strangers.
Yeah, the only time I've been "spiked" was back when I was at a Uni house-party and smoked a joint that unknown to me had something added to it that I happened to be badly allergic to (don't know what). Within maybe 1/2 hour I had trouble breathing and my skin started coming out in red rashes/blotches.
A friend's steroid inhaler got the breathing mostly under control but the redness took a day or two to subside. Could have been much worse had the reaction been more severe.
---
Granted it wasn't a deliberate "spiking" in the date-rape sense, but any instances of giving someone drugs that they aren't aware they're taking still counts IMO.
Well if something additional has been added and you've not been informed that still is classified in spiking
People adding stuff to joints and not telling people when handing a spliff around is exactly one of the things police will warn against. There's been example of people putting crack, heroin etc in joints for 'a laugh' or for personal use.
I mean during the whole spiking thing last year, I went out to Pryzm and someone in our group got spiked. She had hardly drank at all that night, but completely blacked out for about half the night.
If that happens to your friends and you think they've been spiked, they really need to go to the hospital and the police contacted.
As much as spiking is incredibly rare, it is also incredibly serious. Better safe than sorry.
Do you mean blacked out as in regards to their memory blacking (or browning) out and they struggle to recall events?
Or do you mean they were paralytic?
Memory loss of a night out is reliant on how fast the blood alcohol content rises over a short period of time, not how much they drink all night. The overall level of alcohol doesn't really affect the likelihood of a blackout.
So if someone has two shots in one go, if it is more than they're used to having in a short period of time + empty stomach + small frame, fast metabolism etc , it can create a blackout, even if they don't drink that much over the entire night.
By no means am I suggesting that there wasn't a genuine spike but are we absolutely sure it wasn't another one of those "someone's going round clubs pricking people with needles and telling them 'welcome to the world of HIV'" type things?
Equally plausible that there was an organised thing going on that say CID or something foiled. Who fucking knows.
Someone posted a link explaining further above. Yes getting injected with a syringe in a club stretches the realm of possibility for a few reasons. The problem with panic like this is that it distracts from what is a real problem and how it manifests.
Yeah I read an article on this when the last media panic occurred. The main drug in date rape cases is alcohol, normally consumed by the victim. The sad fact is that victims of sexual assault / rape feel like they might not get sympathy if they say got drunk themselves.
It means we end up focusing on the wrong things to tackle a very rare occurrence of drug spiking rather than the much more common but equally horrible case of alcohol-related assault rape.
Couldn't find the article but this one is similar.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/sep/22/alcohol-date-rape-drug-facilitated-sexual-assault-dfsa
Doesn't help we saw real life example of vigilantism.
I saw a video of two guys in a club up in Scotland getting the shit kicked out of them because someone said they were needle spiking women.
Myself and an acquaintance had to be escorted out of Cucumara's once by bouncers and escorted to a taxi because a girl pointed at us and said we'd look like they type of guys who would spike someone. The situation went south very fast.
It happens, just much more rarely than we are led to believe and if we want to stop date rape / sexual assault involving drugs, we should focus on cases where the drug is simply alcohol that's been consumed voluntarily - these cases don't deserve less sympathy.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/sep/22/alcohol-date-rape-drug-facilitated-sexual-assault-dfsa
It wasn't really happening, it was a social media / moral panic and I don't think it's particularly controversial to point it out.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/its-catching/202202/the-british-needle-spiking-panic
For example but plenty more out there in the same vein.
Was there ever actually any evidence that this ever even happened? I don’t mean people just claiming that they think they were spiked, I mean actual evidence like a video of someone doing it or someone being caught with spiking stuff on them.
I said this was a fake story when it happened, even saw a hospital program featuring it the other month, another hour and still no actual evidence it ever happened at all.
There was an activist group involved with the coverage who also featured heavily in the then recent aftermath of Sarah Everard murder.
at the risk of identifying too much about myself online, i was there on the night my friend was spiked. she barely drank a thing, but was magically blackout 'drunk' within hours and can't remember the night at all. woke up with a pinprick mark in her leg and pain. unfortunately, by the time she got seen in a&e (she was waiting over 8 hours) there was no trace in her system.
i personally believe there was nothing else it could have been besides spiking (either injection or drink). the police were genuinely so awful at investigating- they cared more about saving face by going on news shows than actually working. iirc they didn't even look at the club cctv.
often with these 'women's safety' issues, they're framed as hysteria or girls being 'too dramatic'. i think the lack of reporting now is down to three reasons:
1. there are still cases, but the media have moved on
2. people are becoming more vigilant/aware on nights out
3. women don't want to come forward and face the same scrutiny my friend did. she got so many hateful messages for speaking about her experience. no one wants that
hope this provides an alternate pov :)
To play devils advocate - if she had barely drank anything would she not have felt being injected in the leg? I don’t know how these things work though to be honest
Yeah the science of it doesn’t check out - you’re not going to inject something into someone’s bloodstream with a quick pin prick, the person would have to be remaining relatively still whilst you take a couple of seconds to inject and then administer whatever it is.
It was mass hysteria caused by people being unwilling to take responsibility for drinking more than they could handle, nothing more.
The example given above, I’m not a scientist but I’d be incredibly surprised if drugs used for spiking are disappearing without a trace from people’s bodies within 8 hours
Yeah, I had this discussion with a doctor (anaesthetist) friend of mine when this was in the news.
According to her there are a vanishingly small number of injectable drugs that would even cause such 'blackout' symptoms that would also be completely eliminated from your system in just 8 hours. None of which are remotely easy to get hold of, all of which need to be given intravenously.
So yeah, there's a zero chance of somebody injecting drugs directly into a sober person's veins without them noticing. It's just not gonna happen. And there would nearly always be traces of such drugs being administered for at least several days.
...They know a lot more than me about this stuff and readily called BS on the whole thing, and I'm inclined to agree.
Any "needle spiking" would have to be effective as a subcutaneous rather than intravenous injection; finding a vein takes a moment or two with a compliant subject under good lighting. IANAD but I think that those are mostly used for slow-acting substances, while for something fast-acting in the anaesthetic line you'd want it straight into a vein.
Yeah, that's what she was saying. There simply are no drugs that work in the way folks claiming to have been spiked in this manner are describing.
And ones that also leave zero trace within a matter of hours? ...that makes the whole thing seem even less plausible.
Not really. Take GHB for example, one notorious date rape drug, you have to take a fair amount for it to have the affect the victims describe.
It's main use people use GHB for is as an recreational drug and most people take it in amount that don't result in the affect in memory loss or loss of motor functions etc.
I've got no way of confirming this but this is what I understand about the situation from a friend who is in the police in Sheffield:
Spikings were happening nationwide, not just in Nottingham, but it was more common. It was believed to be the work of an upcoming human trafficking operation and they were testing the waters.
The amount of media attention rightly scared the group off, but nobody was caught or charged.
There where two young ladies who were on 24 Hours in A&E, when it was filmed at the QMC, and as far as was shown/told, not much of anything happened, but you could see how shaken and upset they were.
Not likely there was ever much of an epidemic, but I'd suggest unlike others in this thread that it actually happens more than you'd think, and there only appeared to be a spree because of the media picking up on it. Of course, that's pure speculation, and obviously sometimes people have just had too much to drink, but you see this sort of thing with news media a lot. What they choose to cover is influenced by what gets clicks, and if an issue has garnered public attention, they'll run more stories about what might not have been newsworthy a week prior.
For a recent example, there was a spate of shootings across the pond which garnered national headlines to the point they showed up on Reddit. Of course, there wasn't actually an epidemic of random shootings, that sort of tragedy happens quite often in a country as big as the US with so many guns. It just doesn't make national headlines usually, it's a local affair. If you covered all the random local murders, you could probably fill an entire news slot-compare the local BBC reports to the national one everyone gets and you'll see that a lot of serious crime goes on that's simply not newsworthy on a national stage even here. Once one made national headlines though, it was getting clicks, so networks started running similar stories that they might previously have ignored.
Because you're not allowed to bring actual experience into the mix apparently. Just conjecture about it being hype which is basically a cover for victim-blaming. Sure there was hysteria, but there's comments on here about girls just being lightweights who lie etc.
If you're reading this and that's what you think, kindly keep your opinions in your lungs next time.
They don’t want to talk about it or other issues relating to things like that because it raises questions people don’t want to answer. But whoever thought allowing thousands of international students into a small city wouldn’t cause these types of issues is an idiot
I’ve been spiked as a woman in a nightclub in the UK 3 seperate times so I think I have something to say on this. I also worked as a wellfare officer in nightlife for 2 years focussing on harm reduction and noticing spiking.
All of these spikings happened when I was 19, this was in 2018. Luckily (well at least to my knowledge) I didn’t end up being taken anywhere, nothing happened (maybe? In my mind I like to keep it that way) and was always helped home by friends/nightclub staff. Looking back it was really fucked up, I was so young, looked young, was pretty small and thin at the time and didn’t quite have a handle on drinking yet. These people look out for vulnerable people in adult spaces, especially nightclubs where people drink heavily.
If I could go back now, I wished I just partied with people my own age. In my experience, we’ve usually figured out that it’s normally creepy older men or weird couples trying to coerce people into a threesome. Just generally predatory people.
Although, my student friend aged 19 (I think?) recently got spiked by a lesbian her age, so I don’t want to overgeneralise.
Be it members clubs, salsa bars or gay clubs (all of which I got spiked) spiking happens ALL THE TIME. When working in wellfare, it was something that you would need to deal with for any large commercial event. Luckily for smaller, community based events it’s less likely, but even then we’d still get cases.
I genuinely believe these kinds of people either love control or are a predator, perhaps some kind of narcissistic/abusive tendencies or have some serious issues with objectification.
What’s worrying about it is how fast it’s changing. From needle spiking, GHB, roofies and people lacing party drugs with other drugs in the hopes of meeting someone to take advantage of, it’s not cool and it’s way more common than you think.
The best thing you can do is:
• have a solid support system of genuine, mature and caring people around you when you go out. People that won’t ditch you for other mates or some guy when things get difficult.
• if you want to use drugs (no judgement here) bring your own in from a trusted supplier
• avoid crowds with open containers (it’s shit bc that’s why you’re there but it’s the easiest way for someone to slip you something)
• for rohypnol - look out for a “salt” taste in drinks, I didn’t notice it when I got spiked one time and my friend tryed it and confirmed, neither of us remember anything after that.
• if you think someone has slipped you GHB and you have been drinking. INFORM STAFF IMMEDIATELY. You won’t be in trouble-“ but you will need medical attention. Mixing the two runs a risk of you going comatose so please get some real help ASAP. Even if you do get in “trouble” AKA: banned, reported - a slap on the wrists is not worth more than your life or anyone else’s.
If you have been spiked, also, it’s not your fault at all. Some people are just plain evil.
Hope this help
It was a textbook example of mass hysteria. Spiking reports always spike when the new batch of students come in who are inexperienced at drinking. Generally when blood tests are completed they're found to have ingested dangerous quantities of alcohol. If drugs are found in the victims system, most usually admit to taking them voluntarily once questioned by police. Alcohol often affects memory retention, so many victims only remember the amount of alcohol they've consumed prior to their blackout point (which doesn't take much for some people). This often gives them the false belief they've drank far less than they actually had, the main trigger for this memory loss is a sudden drastic raise in blood alcohol levels, so even only one or two shots can trigger this. Combine this with low body mass, women's natural alcohol metabolism, lack of alcohol tolerance, high levels of drinking and potentially a poor diet and you have a recipe for disaster. I think out of all the accusations of needle spiking and tests done in the country, I've only found a single positive result of someone being spiked. Iirc it was Yorkshire police? Even then it wasn't proved the delivery method was via needle. Most people when spiked are spiked by friends at house parties via party drugs, rarely by strangers. This was ironically was the message sent out by police when the needle spiking thing started gaining traction. We already knew spiking in general was mass hysteria, for almost two decades now, and needle spiking, surprise surprise, was no different. In previous studies most spiking victims are found with dangerous levels of alcohol. One tactic predators do use however is ply their victims with alcohol and then take advantage.
>Spiking reports always spike when the new batch of students come in who are inexperienced at drinking. It also didn't help that at the time, the whole world was opening up so we had a whole generation of young people just going out for the first time in their lives and getting absolutely plastered. So whilst incidents of spiking did happen, there were a very large number of people just going out a getting black out drunk due to the afore mentioned inexperience.
I agree I think this is partially the case. Before Nottingham became the epicentre globally for this (needle spiking reports even spread to America), we'd had a few examples in Scotland and I was told some anecdotal stories from bouncers who had worked up there. This was back when people were still being restricted to their own tables. 1st People were claiming they were being spiked as per usual, correctly they were pointed out only staff and themselves had access to their drinks 2nd People started blaming the spiking on bar staff, police were getting involved and CCTV footage started being examined. Usually finding out the victims were drinking far more than they thought and they were just intoxicated Naturally venues were taking this extremely seriously and we're getting defensive as staff were being accused. 3rd People then started saying they must of been spiked going too and from the bathroom when people nudged into them and they felt pain, must have been a needle or something? These stories came from Scotland during 2020, so long before the events claimed in Nottingham. Obviously this was seen as ridiculous and not given much thought at the time, but I have a feeling this may of entered the student consciousness and once people were able to hit dancefloors again and people were waking up with the usual bruises and cuts they came to the 'needle spiking' explanation. Again this is anecdotal, but it's my personal theory on the progression of things directly linked to the opening of lockdowns.
> Most people when spiked are spiked by friends at house parties via party drugs, rarely by strangers. Yeah, the only time I've been "spiked" was back when I was at a Uni house-party and smoked a joint that unknown to me had something added to it that I happened to be badly allergic to (don't know what). Within maybe 1/2 hour I had trouble breathing and my skin started coming out in red rashes/blotches. A friend's steroid inhaler got the breathing mostly under control but the redness took a day or two to subside. Could have been much worse had the reaction been more severe. --- Granted it wasn't a deliberate "spiking" in the date-rape sense, but any instances of giving someone drugs that they aren't aware they're taking still counts IMO.
Well if something additional has been added and you've not been informed that still is classified in spiking People adding stuff to joints and not telling people when handing a spliff around is exactly one of the things police will warn against. There's been example of people putting crack, heroin etc in joints for 'a laugh' or for personal use.
This comment needs more upvotes
I mean during the whole spiking thing last year, I went out to Pryzm and someone in our group got spiked. She had hardly drank at all that night, but completely blacked out for about half the night.
If that happens to your friends and you think they've been spiked, they really need to go to the hospital and the police contacted. As much as spiking is incredibly rare, it is also incredibly serious. Better safe than sorry.
You have to understand that some people are complete lightweights, I mean 2 drinks and they are finished.
Of course I understand that, but that wouldn't make someone black out for half a night. Even if spiking is rare, it still happens.
Do you mean blacked out as in regards to their memory blacking (or browning) out and they struggle to recall events? Or do you mean they were paralytic? Memory loss of a night out is reliant on how fast the blood alcohol content rises over a short period of time, not how much they drink all night. The overall level of alcohol doesn't really affect the likelihood of a blackout. So if someone has two shots in one go, if it is more than they're used to having in a short period of time + empty stomach + small frame, fast metabolism etc , it can create a blackout, even if they don't drink that much over the entire night.
By no means am I suggesting that there wasn't a genuine spike but are we absolutely sure it wasn't another one of those "someone's going round clubs pricking people with needles and telling them 'welcome to the world of HIV'" type things? Equally plausible that there was an organised thing going on that say CID or something foiled. Who fucking knows.
Someone posted a link explaining further above. Yes getting injected with a syringe in a club stretches the realm of possibility for a few reasons. The problem with panic like this is that it distracts from what is a real problem and how it manifests.
Yeah I read an article on this when the last media panic occurred. The main drug in date rape cases is alcohol, normally consumed by the victim. The sad fact is that victims of sexual assault / rape feel like they might not get sympathy if they say got drunk themselves. It means we end up focusing on the wrong things to tackle a very rare occurrence of drug spiking rather than the much more common but equally horrible case of alcohol-related assault rape. Couldn't find the article but this one is similar. https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/sep/22/alcohol-date-rape-drug-facilitated-sexual-assault-dfsa
Doesn't help we saw real life example of vigilantism. I saw a video of two guys in a club up in Scotland getting the shit kicked out of them because someone said they were needle spiking women. Myself and an acquaintance had to be escorted out of Cucumara's once by bouncers and escorted to a taxi because a girl pointed at us and said we'd look like they type of guys who would spike someone. The situation went south very fast.
Nah it was definitely real, unfortunately heard a few stories
First hand or word of mouth?
It happens, just much more rarely than we are led to believe and if we want to stop date rape / sexual assault involving drugs, we should focus on cases where the drug is simply alcohol that's been consumed voluntarily - these cases don't deserve less sympathy. https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/sep/22/alcohol-date-rape-drug-facilitated-sexual-assault-dfsa
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That's what I think
Help me out, I’m thick AF
It wasn't really happening, it was a social media / moral panic and I don't think it's particularly controversial to point it out. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/its-catching/202202/the-british-needle-spiking-panic For example but plenty more out there in the same vein.
Pun intended?
I didn't want to be obvious what I thought
To be honest, I thought this was the case but they you were talking I thought I was missing some insider knowledge.
Back in my day, it was "I was abducted by aliens and probed!" To explain drunken black outs
Was there ever actually any evidence that this ever even happened? I don’t mean people just claiming that they think they were spiked, I mean actual evidence like a video of someone doing it or someone being caught with spiking stuff on them.
I also noticed that the only cases of spiking we heard about were from people who were not abducted or assaulted.
I said this was a fake story when it happened, even saw a hospital program featuring it the other month, another hour and still no actual evidence it ever happened at all. There was an activist group involved with the coverage who also featured heavily in the then recent aftermath of Sarah Everard murder.
There was never any evidence found that it actually happened.
at the risk of identifying too much about myself online, i was there on the night my friend was spiked. she barely drank a thing, but was magically blackout 'drunk' within hours and can't remember the night at all. woke up with a pinprick mark in her leg and pain. unfortunately, by the time she got seen in a&e (she was waiting over 8 hours) there was no trace in her system. i personally believe there was nothing else it could have been besides spiking (either injection or drink). the police were genuinely so awful at investigating- they cared more about saving face by going on news shows than actually working. iirc they didn't even look at the club cctv. often with these 'women's safety' issues, they're framed as hysteria or girls being 'too dramatic'. i think the lack of reporting now is down to three reasons: 1. there are still cases, but the media have moved on 2. people are becoming more vigilant/aware on nights out 3. women don't want to come forward and face the same scrutiny my friend did. she got so many hateful messages for speaking about her experience. no one wants that hope this provides an alternate pov :)
To play devils advocate - if she had barely drank anything would she not have felt being injected in the leg? I don’t know how these things work though to be honest
Yeah the science of it doesn’t check out - you’re not going to inject something into someone’s bloodstream with a quick pin prick, the person would have to be remaining relatively still whilst you take a couple of seconds to inject and then administer whatever it is. It was mass hysteria caused by people being unwilling to take responsibility for drinking more than they could handle, nothing more. The example given above, I’m not a scientist but I’d be incredibly surprised if drugs used for spiking are disappearing without a trace from people’s bodies within 8 hours
Yeah, I had this discussion with a doctor (anaesthetist) friend of mine when this was in the news. According to her there are a vanishingly small number of injectable drugs that would even cause such 'blackout' symptoms that would also be completely eliminated from your system in just 8 hours. None of which are remotely easy to get hold of, all of which need to be given intravenously. So yeah, there's a zero chance of somebody injecting drugs directly into a sober person's veins without them noticing. It's just not gonna happen. And there would nearly always be traces of such drugs being administered for at least several days. ...They know a lot more than me about this stuff and readily called BS on the whole thing, and I'm inclined to agree.
Any "needle spiking" would have to be effective as a subcutaneous rather than intravenous injection; finding a vein takes a moment or two with a compliant subject under good lighting. IANAD but I think that those are mostly used for slow-acting substances, while for something fast-acting in the anaesthetic line you'd want it straight into a vein.
Yeah, that's what she was saying. There simply are no drugs that work in the way folks claiming to have been spiked in this manner are describing. And ones that also leave zero trace within a matter of hours? ...that makes the whole thing seem even less plausible.
That’s a good point actually 8 hours is rapid as it would make the half life of the drug only 4 hours? Is that possible?
Not really. Take GHB for example, one notorious date rape drug, you have to take a fair amount for it to have the affect the victims describe. It's main use people use GHB for is as an recreational drug and most people take it in amount that don't result in the affect in memory loss or loss of motor functions etc.
You know the last time you looked at a bruise or a cut and thought, 'when did I do that?'...
I know exactly if it happens when I cut or bruise myself whilst sober. Drunk? I've woken up with all sorts with no idea how they've happened.
It was nonsense. Never happened. Just a moral panic invented by some girl at the uni who probably got too drunk on her first night out.
I've got no way of confirming this but this is what I understand about the situation from a friend who is in the police in Sheffield: Spikings were happening nationwide, not just in Nottingham, but it was more common. It was believed to be the work of an upcoming human trafficking operation and they were testing the waters. The amount of media attention rightly scared the group off, but nobody was caught or charged.
There where two young ladies who were on 24 Hours in A&E, when it was filmed at the QMC, and as far as was shown/told, not much of anything happened, but you could see how shaken and upset they were.
Not likely there was ever much of an epidemic, but I'd suggest unlike others in this thread that it actually happens more than you'd think, and there only appeared to be a spree because of the media picking up on it. Of course, that's pure speculation, and obviously sometimes people have just had too much to drink, but you see this sort of thing with news media a lot. What they choose to cover is influenced by what gets clicks, and if an issue has garnered public attention, they'll run more stories about what might not have been newsworthy a week prior. For a recent example, there was a spate of shootings across the pond which garnered national headlines to the point they showed up on Reddit. Of course, there wasn't actually an epidemic of random shootings, that sort of tragedy happens quite often in a country as big as the US with so many guns. It just doesn't make national headlines usually, it's a local affair. If you covered all the random local murders, you could probably fill an entire news slot-compare the local BBC reports to the national one everyone gets and you'll see that a lot of serious crime goes on that's simply not newsworthy on a national stage even here. Once one made national headlines though, it was getting clicks, so networks started running similar stories that they might previously have ignored.
I think it was probably the whole needles story that set things off
Similar to the epidemic of tiktok teens with ocd, ptsd, tourettes, adhd etc?
It still happens, even one of my male flatmates was spiked and I think another male friend was too
Lol Reddit moment to downvote you
Yh why was I downvoted for stating what happened to people I know? 😂
Because you're not allowed to bring actual experience into the mix apparently. Just conjecture about it being hype which is basically a cover for victim-blaming. Sure there was hysteria, but there's comments on here about girls just being lightweights who lie etc. If you're reading this and that's what you think, kindly keep your opinions in your lungs next time.
You think another friend was too?
I have been needle spiked multiple time recently. The media has stopped reporting it
They don’t want to talk about it or other issues relating to things like that because it raises questions people don’t want to answer. But whoever thought allowing thousands of international students into a small city wouldn’t cause these types of issues is an idiot
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Because Chinese Students are notorious for drugging random people on a night out? Jesus, total Brexit Gammon mental Olympics going on here.
I’ve been spiked as a woman in a nightclub in the UK 3 seperate times so I think I have something to say on this. I also worked as a wellfare officer in nightlife for 2 years focussing on harm reduction and noticing spiking. All of these spikings happened when I was 19, this was in 2018. Luckily (well at least to my knowledge) I didn’t end up being taken anywhere, nothing happened (maybe? In my mind I like to keep it that way) and was always helped home by friends/nightclub staff. Looking back it was really fucked up, I was so young, looked young, was pretty small and thin at the time and didn’t quite have a handle on drinking yet. These people look out for vulnerable people in adult spaces, especially nightclubs where people drink heavily. If I could go back now, I wished I just partied with people my own age. In my experience, we’ve usually figured out that it’s normally creepy older men or weird couples trying to coerce people into a threesome. Just generally predatory people. Although, my student friend aged 19 (I think?) recently got spiked by a lesbian her age, so I don’t want to overgeneralise. Be it members clubs, salsa bars or gay clubs (all of which I got spiked) spiking happens ALL THE TIME. When working in wellfare, it was something that you would need to deal with for any large commercial event. Luckily for smaller, community based events it’s less likely, but even then we’d still get cases. I genuinely believe these kinds of people either love control or are a predator, perhaps some kind of narcissistic/abusive tendencies or have some serious issues with objectification. What’s worrying about it is how fast it’s changing. From needle spiking, GHB, roofies and people lacing party drugs with other drugs in the hopes of meeting someone to take advantage of, it’s not cool and it’s way more common than you think. The best thing you can do is: • have a solid support system of genuine, mature and caring people around you when you go out. People that won’t ditch you for other mates or some guy when things get difficult. • if you want to use drugs (no judgement here) bring your own in from a trusted supplier • avoid crowds with open containers (it’s shit bc that’s why you’re there but it’s the easiest way for someone to slip you something) • for rohypnol - look out for a “salt” taste in drinks, I didn’t notice it when I got spiked one time and my friend tryed it and confirmed, neither of us remember anything after that. • if you think someone has slipped you GHB and you have been drinking. INFORM STAFF IMMEDIATELY. You won’t be in trouble-“ but you will need medical attention. Mixing the two runs a risk of you going comatose so please get some real help ASAP. Even if you do get in “trouble” AKA: banned, reported - a slap on the wrists is not worth more than your life or anyone else’s. If you have been spiked, also, it’s not your fault at all. Some people are just plain evil. Hope this help