Saturday 28 April 2007

Drink Spiking - It's Real.

I am in my element at the moment…. I’m writing this post, shopping on ebay, downloading music, straightening my hair and watching the live streaming of the European Gymnastics Championships all at once – I am so thankful God made woman so efficient at multi-tasking! I feel for guys, who are only able to concentrate on one thing at a time… imagine how long it would take them to do what I’m doing now. I suppose, thinking ahead to what my future holds, if I do end up having kids one day I will need these skills far more than any guy, as I’ll need to able to deal with kids, take care of a husband, cook, clean and somehow still take time for myself so I don’t go mad – all whole holding down a job. Hmm, no wonder many women give up their careers. Ok, I’ve just stopped doing my hair for a moment – even a woman has her limits!

I spoke to my sister Mini-Me a couple of days ago, and she had a story to tell me that I thought I should share, seeing as how I’m more focussed on it now that it’s just happened to someone close to me. She went to Tiger Tiger in Cape Town last Saturday, and her drink got spiked. She was designated driver, and only had a couple of drinks, but she remembers nothing about the last half of the night. Her boyfriend G filled in the blanks: apparently she went from having a good time to talking absolute nonsense to anyone and no-one, and he eventually had to carry her out of the club because she couldn’t walk. This could also be a result of excessive hard drinking, of course, but since she’d only had a couple glasses of wine, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happened. Talking like a crazy person is one thing, but even when you’re really pissed, you know who your friends are and you know who you’re supposed to go home with. G said she would have gone anywhere with anyone – a total white-out in terms of reality.

Tiger is a chain with clubs worldwide – we’ve been to the London one a couple of times ourselves. It seems though, that it’s only the Cape Town club that has this reputation for girls getting their drinks spiked. Before I even knew what kind of club Tiger was (it opened after we’d already left for the UK), I had heard about the dangers there. Interestingly enough, Scarves’ friends M & I were visiting from CT last weekend, and M works at Tiger, so we had a discussion about this literally the day before it happened to Mini-Me. M loves her job, and was understandably defensive about the realities of what go on there. She says all the staff are aware of the reputation of the club, but that there is no proof to confirm the epidemic of drink spiking, as the rumours suggest. She told me that Tiger has a policy whereby if a girl who suspects her drink has been spiked goes to the hospital and has tests done, and those tests come back positive, Tiger will cover all the medical costs as compensation. She said out of the girls who had taken them up on the offer, no tests had come back positive. What she didn’t say was how many girls had actually done this. As soon as I found out it had happened to Mini-Me, I told her about this policy and suggested she go have the tests done, as even though covering the costs of medical bills doesn’t do much for one psychologically, at least you have the peace of mind of knowing for sure that what happened to you was a result of someone else’s malevolence, and not anything you did to yourself.

Mini-Me did a bit of research, and she found out that most of these drugs that are used to spike drinks only stay in your system for about 2 days, so unless you go to the hospital almost straight away, the chances testing positive are slim. Rohypnol, still one of the most common drugs used in drink spiking, of online reports are to be believed, can usually only be detected on up to 24 hours after it has been ingested. By the time I found out about it and relayed Tiger’s policy, two full days had passed. Another thing that seems to put girls off taking the tests is that they cost R1000, and aren’t covered by medical aid. If you’ve just had your drink spiked with a powerful drug, chances are you will take the whole of the next day or two to recover - Mini-Me said she only felt normal again four days later, and actually left work on Monday because she wasn’t coping. When you feel that terrible the last thing you’re thinking about is going for some tests, and by the time you’re feeling sufficiently clear-headed to consider getting them done, the chances are the drug is already out of your system and you have to foot the bill for R1000. Not many people have this kind of cash lying around, especially for what seems then to be a pointless exercise.

Mini-Me started speaking to some other people about what had happened to her, and discovered that at least two other friends she knows well had similar experiences at Tiger. One was found passed out behind the bar by a group of Mini-Me’s friends on a guys night out. She was lucky that people she knew found her, as the guys carried her out the club and took her home, delivering her into her father’s care. Her father took her for the test the next day, and it came back positive. According to the doctors at the hospital, the drug used to incapacitate women in clubs work differently depending on how much alcohol you’ve had. If you’re very drunk before someone slips you the drug, you just pass out, which is what happened to Mini-Me’s friend. If you’re sober, or have only had one or two drinks when you ingest the drug, that’s when the real danger surfaces, because you’re awake and talking and you just look very drunk, but you’re completely unaware of what is happening, and you will go anywhere and do anything with anyone.

It doesn’t help to get enraged about an event that has happened in the past, especially one which had a happy ending, when it could very easily have gone the other way. It’s lucky my sister was there with her boyfriend and a bunch of friends who kept an eye on her all night, as it would only have taken a few minutes of her being on her own for some potential rapist to escort her out the club and assault her. It doesn’t help either to rant furiously about what type of guy would do this to a woman, and how weak, pathetic and utterly despicable they must be to see raping a drugged woman as some kind of sport or conquest. People like this and worse do exist, and normal people like you and I will never understand them.

What does bear a mention though, is what exactly is Tiger Tiger doing about this, and is there anything that can be done to stop it? It’s all very well to have a policy offering monetary compensation for medical costs, but how does that help if the girls gets abducted from the club and raped before she finds out what happened to her? R1000 is hardly adequate for such a soul-destroying, and indeed, possibly life-threatening, incident.

As of the end of 2006 (I can’t confirm whether or not this is true of today), Tiger Tiger in Cape Town had notices up on their walls in small print warning clubbers to be on the alert for drink spiking., but they also said that the club had only one confirmed case, and that only 3% of all reported drinking spikings test positive.

I googled drink spiking, with particular reference to Tiger Tiger, and found mixed results. An IOL article from July 2006 talks about drink spiking being on the rise in SA, and mentions Tiger, Billy the Bum’s and another club, Casablanca, all in Durban. The article describes how newspapers were being contacted at the time with reports of increasing numbers of incidents in which women found themselves or their friends victims of suspected drink spiking. A police reservist who had been researching drink spiking in clubs for 4 years disputed the claims, saying that while it does happen, it is very rare that a drink is spiked, and only 3 – 5% of such claims were true. He went on to say that there are many factors which could cause a woman to feel as if her drink has been spiked, including not eating before going out drinking, medication or the menstrual cycle. I’m just going to interrupt my report here and say that those words could only come from a man – I suppose then that the increasing numbers of Cape Town girls passing out and behaving like irrational crazies at Tiger is all down to the menstrual cycle, but of course, how could we not have thought of that? Bloody shithead. Sorry, anyway…..a nurse at a private hospital confirmed the increase in numbers of calls about drink spiking incidents, but of those who came for the tests, very few tested positive (no mention of what the average time frame was between the incidents and the tests).

Fair Lady magazine reported that a private investigator who specialises in drug rapes had been involved in 60 cases of drug rapes by the end of 2006 – and those were the ones that were reported.

The general lack of information online about drink spiking in South Africa suggests that either it is a fairly new problem, which would explain the lack of statistics and reports until the newspaper and magazine articles which recently started appearing, or that there is a cover-up of some sort going on. I’m inclined to believe the former – what with the massive cover-ups of SA’s tourist deterring crime such as murders, hijackings and muggings, I would imagine this would not be as important to the government to hide. Also, it’s a simple one for tourists to deal with - stay out of clubs.

There are however, loads of info and statistics online about drink spiking and related crimes in the UK and other countries. Undercover cops collecting glasses at a popular nightclub in the UK discovered that 14% of the glasses they tested contained intoxicating substances other than alcohol. In 2003 there were over 1 000 reported incidents of spiked drinks in the UK. However, it is estimated that 84% of victims fail to report the crime. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, an estimated 4500 people in Australia had their drinks spiked in 2004, with about 40 percent of them being sexually assaulted.

While it might not be possible to determine exactly how serious the problem is in South African clubs at this time, one thing is clear – drink spiking is not the stuff of urban legends – it’s real, it’s happening, and people we know are being affected. It’s a blurred line as to whose responsibility it is to tackle this problem. Certainly, women going clubbing and drinking or taking recreational drugs should be looking out for themselves, and maintaining enough sobriety to be aware of what is going on around them at all times – anything less and they are taking their lives into their own hands. But by the same token, club owners should be held accountable for any illegal or dangerous activities which are going on in their establishments – it is their responsibility to their patrons to make sure their club is safe and secure for the people who come to have a good time.

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