When I began this project I actually knew very little about the topic of drink spiking aside from stories I had heard along the way growing up. As a teenager I had heard rumors of malicious drink spiking, where the object was to give a peer mind-altering drugs they would never take themselves, or to wreak vengeance on someone by putting laxative chocolate in their drink. Older kids talked about spiking nonalcoholic punch with grain alcohol at parties, but these plans (often just wishful thinking) were thoroughly for their own consumption and enjoyment, and the joke was only on the adults. Unsuspecting ingesters were not intentional victims; they simply did not know, and did not think to ask.
Whether mild tampering or more dangerous drugs spiking is involved, law enforcement has tended to label such acts âmaliciousâ when they are an end in themselves. It was only when I began to investigate the modern concern with so-called date rape drugs that I began to think of drink spiking as a criminally instrumental, rather than merely expressive, act. A large part of the time, drink spiking is actually an end in itself.
Not all surreptitious druggingâor fears and suspicion of suchâinvolves drink spiking. Undesired drugs can come in food, can be inhaled, and can be substituted for other (desired) drugs. Our contemporary familiarity with the topicâfrom the current scare about so-called date rape drugsâtends to lead us to assume that only drugs that knock people outâcentral nervous system (CNS) depressants or CNS drugsâare used this way. In fact, there is a long history of stimulants working their way into the surreptitious drugging scenario. Aphrodisiacs, of course, can also be slipped to someone. In all cases, druggers may misunderstand the effects of a drug as much as those of us who simply read about it in the papers. Our misunderstandings are great in number: what druggers intend, how common surreptitious drugging is, how drugged people react, and whether advice about the problem is really useful?
My aim in this book is to look at the modern history of drugging, particularly drink spiking, starting with the dawn of the industrial era, at least in the USA, in the early to mid-1800s. At this time, cities grew large with new immigrants and in-migrants from rural areas for the promise of urban life and economic advancement. Both new social relationships and feelings of anonymity ensued, and the pace of life intensified. The time clockâs reign and the speed of movement increased. At the same time, modern pharmaceuticals were born, and some were quickly pressed into service to quell the agitation that came from a world spinning faster. Medicine both promoted and resisted psychoactive answers to this problem, and often times, ordinary people figured out how to use substances old and new to self-medicate.
While certainly one can find occasional references to drink tampering and drugging in literature and history from earlier times, spiking and involuntary drugging did not become a consolidated concern until such time as there was a mass audience for newspapers to warn people of the threat posed by the new synthetic pharmaceuticals. It was also then that the view began to hold that spiking was nearly always a means to an endârobbery, involuntary conscription, mass manipulation, initiation into drug or alcohol dependency, and later, sexual assault.
Yet my early experience of the ideaâwhich seems fairly commonâalso sensitized me to the need to understand such behavior as more than instrumental; broader than just criminal incapacitation. Much like the history of poisoning, spiking has a variety of motivations. Pranks and humiliations, involuntary magic dust ingestion that the purveyor thinks is benevolent, mixed and hesitant motivations for druggingâthese are all found throughout the history of the problem. It may be inherently manipulative and dangerous to give someone something they did not ask for; however, there turn out to be a wide variety of reasons for it.
Much as malicious spiking is a kind of folk practiceâwhether merely mischievous or downright deadlyâfear of it is also. Alongside the volume of cases found in each era is also a rich folklore that develops around the threat of drink spiking, and worries about the problem develop and innovate with much of the same dynamism with which new drugs arise, are prescribed, and come to be used recreationally or as drugs of addiction. Almost without exception, scares about drugging are preceded by an era of boundless and myopic optimism about new psychoactive drugs.
Fear of drugging is not constantâthere are distinct times in the modern era where the fear âflares upââoften apropos of not very much, concretely speaking. Instead of genuinely increased incidences and risk, we often find at those times a host of existing cultural tensions that excess focus on drugging attempts to solve. The incidence of the problem is miniscule in relationship to the problems wrought by willing self-ingestion, but whatever small number of cases emerge during a particular scare provide a reservoir of meaning. Hearing from the authoritiesâin medicine or law enforcementâtime after time that the fear of the problem is much greater than warranted appears to not be much of a damper. Fears are also sometimes enthusiasms, and drink spiking appears to have this quality.
It is easy to see how our magical views of medicine transferred over to our reaction to news that drugs could be used upon us without our knowledge. The first surge in drugging emerged with the rise of synthetic drugs in the mid-1800s, and probably the most widely procuredâand fearedâwas chloral hydrate. Known as âknockout drops,â mostly for self-administration for mood alterers and insomniacs alike, chloral, as it was commonly known, was a widely used synthetic opiate. Chloral hydrate (trichloroacetaldehyde monohydrate) was synthesized in 1832, but first used therapeutically in 1869. Its potential uses were thought to be broad, for a variety of nervous disorders, including alcohol withdrawal, manias, and insomnia. Enthusiasm for its use was vivid, because it was more stable and predictable than natural opiates, which were already widely accessible. Yet chloral hydrate was not without negative effects, which included all of the potential drawbacks of opiatesâsuch as the risk of addiction or overdoseâand then some new ones as well.
Like other CNS depressants, chloral and its inhaled cousin, chloroform, often produce a stage of excitability and disinhibition before they reduce consciousness. Chloral was in some sense a novel threatâa narcotic-like substance that dissolved effortlessly in alcohol and could easily sneak by the senses to depress the CNSâquickly, as it was meant to in anesthesia, and with no time in which a victim might sense that something had gone wrong with their drink. From early reports of drugging, we also learn about the social and psychological agonies of one of its key hallmarksâanterograde amnesia, or the complete inability to account for a period of time. Specifically, the brainâs ability to form and store memories is impaired temporarily, which means that the subjective experience of the time in question is lost permanently. Thus, as with rapid and heavy alcohol consumption, one can experience a âblackout.â This state of affairs is, of course, a real benefit in the legitimate medical use of these drugs. What patient would enjoy remembering a surgery? But in the context of unintentional use, the missing puzzle piece can be experienced as a double violation.
By the turn of the twentieth century, chloral hydrate had been implicated in robbery, burglary, rape, and involuntary conscription into the military or merchant marines. Then, as now, the problem of drink spiking had been interwoven with other broad social concerns. In the USA, in particular, the politics of Temperance and the saloon have played a central role. Here and in Britain, drink spiking has also been tied with cycles of hope and fear regarding technologyâand pharmaceutical innovationâover the last two centuries. The rise of chloral hydrate also coincides with the rise of forensic science (then called âmedical jurisprudenceâ) and toxicology. Police departments and courts desired a new and scientific approach to evidence, but what could be known by carefully gathering evidence and what could be inferred from the emerging rudimentary techniques was limited. That did not stop anyone from declaring any certainties, however. Forensic science had made such a dramatic leap that it was tempting to rely upon new scientific techniques instead of circumstances and situations, unearthed by traditional investigation, which might have better explained the plight of victims.
The plain fact is that even setting aside the incapacitating qualities of alcoholâoften cited in the current caution, âalcohol is the number one date rape drugââthe means, motive, and opportunity for drug-facilitated crime and just plain tampering has always been present. Contrary to current claims that there are distinct and new substances for nefarious purposes, drugging has always been a possibility, particularly since the rise of synthetic anesthetics in the mid-1800s. To simply dropping a powder or a pill in a drink, there have never been formidable barriers.
Nonetheless, there are certain consistencies in the drugging fear over time, too. Fear of drink spiking and drugging tends to attach to public places like saloons, bars, nightclubs, theaters, cafes, and parties rather than private settings. Documented cases, for reasons of physical and social logistics, are just as likely, if not more likely, to take case in private settings. Drugging is often thought of as purely a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, and this can often lead investigators and news reporters alike astray. Some spikingâlike other forms of tampering and poisoningâis often an end in itself.
If we look at reactions to a relatively rare threat such as drink spikingâand a smaller subset of incidentsâdrink spiking to facilitate another crime, we find a whole other set of social, political, cultural, and psychological concerns. Among these are what psychologists call the inner versus outer locus of control, the distribution of responsibility among victim and predator, the nature of the will and its loss more generally when we consider intoxication, and our complex responses to antialcohol and antidrug crusades. These themes are as vivid when the victim is a male and the object robbery as it is when the topic is women and the object sexual assault.
In the contemporary age of what can be called âpharma-ubiquity,â CNS depressants are readily available and plentiful. Communities struggle with misuse and addiction, and legitimate prescriptions still often leave us wondering whether we are taking the right path to manage pain, both physical and psychic. Drugs are everywhere, and not hard to come by.
With drink spiking, it is important to keep at least three different kinds of motivation in mind. The first is malicious or capricious, where altering someone elseâs consciousness is more or less both means and an end. Some of the evidence I look at in this book suggests that this motivation is far more common than we think. To cause a person to become intoxicated by drugs fulfills a desire of the perpetrator or perpetrators to watch what happens next to the victim. The goal, if it can be separated from the act, is perhaps to experience the thrill of chemical mastery over another, or to hope that drugs will cause them to embarrass themselves, or simply for revenge, or just to wreak havoc and produce collective fear.
The second, somewhat less well-defined motivation is what I would call coercive. Here, there is some long-range object in mind, such as fostering an addiction to the substance, or forcing a set of psychoactive consequences on the victim. In the latter case, the perpetrator might even tend to think of the end result as positive for the target rather than negative. This is the reason that I distinguish it from the former âmaliciousâ category. Although the outcomes can be equally negative, the motivation is not quite the same, exploitative and dangerous though the act may be. Drugs (or extra alcohol) might loosen up a nervous friend, or introduce them to hallucinogenic insights, or help them cope with acute emotional distress. The former caseâfostering addictionâis often associated in the public mind with drug dealers and a profit motive. The perpetrator now has a new customer who becomes hooked, but coercive drugging can also be relational in nature. By relational, I mean that the drugs are surreptitiously given to another to keep them closeâas friends, as lovers, or as emotional dependents in some fashion. Serving up a double or triple shot to a friend who asked for âjust a littleâ is hardly an innovation.
Fear of coercion into drugs in this way waxes and wanes at different times historically. For instance, as the Temperance movement gained strength in the USA approaching the twentieth century, coercive themes gained ground dramatically, and blame for alcoholism or drug dependence increasingly was directed at purveyors rather than consumers. At the turn of the century, when any number of strange and troubling incidents were linked in the media to knockout drops in peopleâs drinks, the same papers were reporting on the exploits of the anti-saloon movement. The politics of alcohol itself and drink spiking have always been deeply intertwined. Then, as Prohibition lifted, the spiking fear seemed to drift away.
The third and final category is the predatory, where drink spiking or drugging is a means or method to another criminal end. Essentially, drugs substitute for physical force for a number of tactical reasons. Drugs may have the desired effect of neutralizing resistance to rape, robbery, or abduction; it may foster amnesia and therefore uncertainty on the part of the victim; or, particularly in some cases of rape, satisfy a paraphiliacâs desire for an unresponsive sexual âpartnerâ (sometimes referred to as somnophilia) or satisfy a predatorâs particular modus operandi needsâacting upon another person without them acting backâthat would make them recoil from other forms of force.
In real cases, where predation is the motivation, because drugs are a substitute for physical force, people who have been so victimized often assume, probably erroneously, that had drugs not incapacitated them, they would have been able to fend off the subsequent crime. Particularly in the case of rape, we know that no special vulnerability is needed on the part of the victim. Social trustânot always deep trust, but merely the level of routine mutual assurance that allows any society to functionâis essentially the primary vulnerability, though enhanced opportunity certainly can aid a perpetrator of any crime. In fact, most reported cases of modern spiking have this kind of contextâthe victim is already trusting of the predator, and is often already in a private location.
The modern date rape drugs scare was originally tied to the revival of what sociologists Karen Weiss and Corey Colyer call âthe protected narrativeâ of drink spiking.1 In other words, rather than being a full-range drug scourge episode, it is very particular in its logistics. The drugs that animated the onset of the current scareâwhat I like to call the Big Threeâflunitrazepam (âroofiesâ), gamma hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), and ketamineâwere, in the early 1990s, covered by the press in what had become a conventional manner: hey, there are some new drugs out there, people are using them to get high, here are some of their attractions, here are a bunch of negative outcomesâthere may be an ominous threat to our youth on the horizon.
But then in 1996, a media niche emerged that emphasized a particular sequence of events: a woman goes to a bar, party, or nightclub, her drink is spiked, she leaves with or is cornered by her assailant, and sexually assaulted. In fact, Florida prosecutors in the Mark Perez case were widely quoted nationwide as explicitly saying that this setup (which did characterize the Perez case) was typical.2 But in the ensuing years even other notorious serial rape cases involving drugging (which, instead, typically took place in the assailantâs home) did not break up this focus on public venue drink spiking. Despite how sensational elements of those cases were, the press by and large preferred the protected narrative. In many ways it is a revival of an earlier protected narrativeâchloral hydrate spiking followed by abduction followed by forced prostitution: essentially what is known to historian as âwhite slaveryâ legends. This narrative emerged in the mid-1800s in Britain and in the late 1800s in the USA, and rapidly gained steam in both places with the rise of antiprostitution and other social purity movements. It died down by the 1920s and was revived briefly in the 1970s as âThe Attempted Abductionââa scenario implicating malls and fashion boutiques and injected drugs for the purpose of kidnapping young women and children into sex slavery.3
Can we really know the true balance of motivations for drink spiking behavior historically? Probably not. Record keeping on this matter is fraught with problems. The first problem concerns official investigation and confirmation. In the past, we know that police reports only sporadically reported the suspected presence of drugs associated with a crime, and for sexual assault in particular, reporting rates have been very low regardless of the circumstances. Forensic analysis and toxicology have been able to address suspicions of drugging only recently.4 And in those few confirmed cases, we do not always know the motivation. In particular, we tend to ignore the possibility of simple malicious motivation, even though the evidence suggests otherwise. This is not very satisfying as an answer: we want to know why.
The second problem concerns media coverage of drugging incidents. The fact that news outlets find drugging novel enough to report on individual cases still does not tell us much about the underlying unreported cases. They may be reported because they are interesting or beca...