DRINK SPIKE VICTIMS SIMPLY DRUNK

Nick at The Thin Man Returns links to a drink spiking study in Perth:

Emergency doctors at Perth's Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital (SCGH) have completed Australia's first medical study on drink spiking.

They found patients' symptoms were often caused by excessive alcohol and illicit drug use rather than sedatives.

"In the community there is a view that drink spiking occurs and that it is the scenario of an offender slipping a sedative into another person's drink, presumably to stupefy them in order to take advantage of them – this is what we used as the basic premise of our study," study leader Dr Mark Little said.

"Our research findings don't support that."

Not one of those reporting to hospital suspecting their drink had been spiked had actually been drugged, not by someone else anyway; they were simply very drunk. Just in case the absence of drink spiking is due to a lack of know-how the Otago University Critic has produced a drink spiking how-to manual:

An explicit date rape article in a Dunedin student magazine has outraged Police and Rape Crisis who say it is a "how-to" guide and revictimises rape victims.

Critic, run by the Otago University Student Association, ran the story outlining types and amounts of drugs to use, what drinks drugs are best concealed in and who is best to target.

The magazine says the item is intended to provoke awareness of the problem and Critic editor Holly Walker is standing by her decision to publish the article in the magazine's annual offensive edition.

"While it's couched in particularly offensive terms, the information that is in there is going to be useful for people preventing this kind of thing happening to them," says Walker.

She says drug information included is widely available on the internet and anyone who would commit date rape wouldn't need a student magazine to tell them how to do it.

Too much information is never enough.

The original Critic article is here but the page enlargements refuse to load. This could be because I'm using a Mac at the moment; the enlargements loaded fine earlier on a PC.