THE last things I remember are the bright overhead bulbs of the basement bar, the booming music and the confidence of the men who’d just joined our group, one with his arm around my shoulders — and his hand hovering very close to my drink.
It was 2009, I was a 19-year old fresher at Nottingham University. Just a few moments later, after I had sipped my second drink of that evening, it was dark and quiet.
I opened my eyes to find myself fully clothed, sitting in a locked cubicle in the ladies’ loos. I can’t remember a more disorienting experience than opening the cubicle door. I could see evidence of a wild club night all around me, from toilet paper on the floor to make up smeared on mirrors. But the people were gone.
I staggered up to the front door, causing a stir in the three staff members who were already on their way out. To the weary staff, I was a nuisance — another girl who’d drunk too much and passed out. ‘I’m not drunk,’ I tried to protest, but I slurred as the words wouldn’t form.
THE last things I remember are the bright overhead bulbs of the basement bar, the booming music and the confidence of the men who’d just joined our group
They brought me out and then I blacked again. I’d been spiked.
No wonder I felt nauseous to read this week that not only does the practice of spiking — surreptitiously intoxicating someone — seem to have resurfaced with a vengeance in my old university town and across the country, but that the perpetrators are now said to be injecting their victims with needles.
In recent days, terrifying reports have emerged of an ‘epidemic’ of young female university students being stabbed with syringes and drugged against their will. This new crime raises concerns about being drugged and rendered unconscious by robbery or raped.
It also makes traditional methods to protect against ‘date rape’ — such as covering one’s drink — completely irrelevant. Several police forces are investigating and say ‘it’s distinctly different’ to anything they’ve seen before.
So, what is the truth? Is it possible that there is an epidemic of sex-abusers injecting girls with drugs on dancefloors? This could be a scare story, or a frightening scare story that began with unverifiable claims made on social media and has terrified thousands of young women.
It is not surprising that there are so many allegations. Young women and at most one man were allegedly involved in injection attacks in the student cities of Nottingham, Liverpool and Cardiff. Police Scotland confirmed that it is investigating reports of unrelated attacks in Edinburgh, Dundee, and Glasgow.
More familiar spiking, such as slipping a drug into someone’s drink, is also on the rise with police in Northern Ireland, Devon and Cornwall warning of girls being targeted at house parties.
Only yesterday, a man was sentenced to seven years in prison for spiking a 19-year-old girl’s drink with cocaine before sexually assaulting her while she was unconscious, and later robbing her of her savings. Police said the incident, which took place in Hull in 2019, was ‘truly shocking’.
The current spiking problem has come at a time of heightened tensions about women’s safety, after details of the murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of a police officer appalled the nation this year and groups such as Reclaim the Streets have called for far greater focus on women’s safety in public spaces.
It was 2009, I was a 19-year old fresher at Nottingham University. I sipped my second drink of that evening shortly after, and it was dark and quiet.
It is clear that drugging people with drugs in their drinks is a serious problem. More than half of students know someone who has been drugged after a night out.
A recent survey by student website The Tab revealed that 12,000 of 23,000 respondents claimed to have known a victim of spiking. However, at least 2,600 people had been targeted.
The alleged epicentre is Nottingham, where multiple disturbing allegations of needle-spiking have emerged this week and a Nottinghamshire Police source said the force had been ‘inundated’ with reports of needle spikings.
In total, the local police have received 47 reports of all spikings (including drugs slipped into drinks and injections) since September 4, of which 15 are allegations of ‘spiking by something sharp as opposed to a traditional method of contaminated alcoholic drinks’ since October 2.
That date closely coincides with the new intake of first-year freshers arriving at the town’s two universities, the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent. Many remain skeptical of the claims of spiking-bysyringe and insist that it is simply panic created by social media.
Experts have also questioned how anyone could inject someone else without their knowledge.
‘Few [date-rape] drugs would be able to be injected,’ Guy Jones, senior scientist at drugs charity the Loop, told the youth-orientated media company Vice this week. ‘Where drugs can be injected non-intravenously [into muscle instead of a blood vessel], there are specific injection sites that do not work well.’
Other experts pointed out that injecting someone with drugs to render them unconscious would require a large, painful needle, a large amount of the drug to inject, or drugs that would remain in the victim’s system for days.
David Caldicott, an emergency medicine consultant and founder of drug testing project WEDINOS, told Vice: ‘The technical and medical knowledge required to perform this would make this deeply improbable. It is comparable to a state-sponsored actor in incapacitating a dissident.
I opened my eyes to find myself fully clothed, sitting in a locked cubicle in the ladies’ loos
‘The idea that a clubber would do this to a fellow clubber seems highly unlikely to me. It’s really hard to stick a needle in someone without them noticing, especially if you have to keep the needle in there for long enough, maybe 20 seconds, to inject enough drugs to cause this.
‘If you were malicious there would be half a dozen much easier other ways to spike someone [such as putting drugs in their drinks].’
However, one professor at a leading medical school told the Daily Mail: ‘It is possible to inject someone with a single click, and that is how some drugs are routinely administered. It would need to be a pre-filled device which is spring-loaded.’
In a date rape scenario, the professor went on, ‘it would need to be a calculated dose, and the drug would need to work fast from a subcutaneous administration’.
To discover the truth, I went back to Nottingham, my former student haunt, for a night on town.
I was skeptical that needle-spiking would be as common as it is this week. Also, that finding victims would be a difficult task. How wrong I was.
Wednesday is one of the city’s most popular student nights and the centre is teeming — but it soon becomes evident that many people are frightened.
I head to The Cell — which calls itself ‘Nottingham’s most exclusive student night’ and where people have warned on Google reviews about spiking incidents that could either be drugs slipped into someone’s drink or from injection. ‘Experienced people trying to spike my friends — club has a serious problem with it,’ wrote a patron called Toby Withers. Another message read: ‘Got spiked!! Don’t go to this club. It is very well known for people getting spiked and I was very ill from it.’
In the ladies’ loo, I meet Daisy, 19, a student at the University of Nottingham who tells me her course-mate Olivia* was spiked last week in Pryzm — the club that has made national headlines for the high concentration of alleged needle stabbings on its premises in the space of just a few days.
‘She got pushed over, and that’s how they got the needle in,’ Daisy told me.
She added: ‘It’s one thing getting spiked, then you add an HIV risk on top of that.’ In response to the claims this week and in particular a social media scare that one woman had tested positive for HIV shortly after a needle injury, the National Aids Trust stated that ‘getting HIV from a needle injury is extremely rare. It can take weeks to get a diagnosis. Our thoughts with those worried by spiking’.
I leave my home and head to Pryzm. Before I enter, staff check my bag and I’m made to walk through a metal detector arch. Charlotte, 19, a first year student, meets me in the smoking area. She tells me about a night in October when two of her friends were allegedly injected at Rock City.
‘I’ve been friends with Katy* since secondary school. She couldn’t stand up, so we got her out of the club, and then she got worse so we took her to A&E. They found that she had high levels of ketamine in her blood. . . She was OK in the end but she had a mark on her hand the next day.’
My stomach churns when I hear what happened to Sophie*, 20. ‘We lost her on the night out,’ says Charlotte. ‘She got raped. She woke up in this boy’s accommodation, she doesn’t think he actually lived there. They collected a swab the next day and found semen, but it was not a match. [on the UK National DNA Database].
‘She had ketamine [a veterinary tranquilliser and recreational drug]in her blood, and a scratchmark on her back. Neither of them go out any more.’
Charlotte says hospital staff told her friends that they had seen a number of girls admitted who had been drugged against their will with ketamine and Rohypnol since freshers’ week.
There are many other girls I speak to with similar stories. Nottingham University student Ruby tells me her 18-year-old friend ‘was spiked in [the Nottingham nightclub]Stealth. She’s getting blood tests as we speak’.
Another tells me her friend, a Nottingham Trent student was at a night out in Vauxhall, central London, ‘and her drink got spiked with powder. He took her down an alleyway and then to a Travelodge’.
I end the night in Pryzm talking to Hannah, an 18-year-old fresher. She tells me that she’s ‘scared’ and is just trying to enjoy her first year of university. I felt unsafe in the club as a single woman and left to return to my hotel.
The next morning, I was horrified when Hannah contacted me to say that her friend Lucy* had apparently been spiked in the club the previous night, just yards from where Hannah and I had been sitting in the smoking area.
Hannah told me that Lucy, 20, a first-year student, was now lying on a ward in the Queen’s Medical Centre hospital.
She said: ‘[Lucy]She was with this man she met in Pryzm. They kept going off together and dancing, so we don’t know what exactly happened. One night, she was crying and stating that her back was really hurting. She felt like something was crawling all across her back and she needed it to be removed. We moved her hair and saw what looked like two injection marks in her back.’
Hannah went on: ‘Lucy kept being sick. She couldn’t breathe, she was crying. We managed to get the taxi to take her, but it was difficult to get her to her room. She was shaking and screaming as she tried to get in. She kept saying “something’s on my back”. We managed to get her changed and that’s when we saw that there definitely were marks in the middle of her upper back.
‘They were deep holes, small and deep. They were also red. And she’d had a reaction as well, so there was red around them spreading, like it was inflamed.
‘It seems like her body had reacted to whatever it was she was injected with. It was obvious that she wanted to sleep soon, which suggests that it was a dating-rape. [drug].’
Hannah called her friends and called an ambulance, which arrived two hours later. The paramedics said Lucy’s heart rate was double what it should be and her blood pressure was irregular. She was taken to the hospital at 4.30 am.
‘This morning we had confirmation [from the hospital]That she had been spiked. It was two injections. She is still there now being monitored.’
Lucy’s parents are aware and the Mail has reported the incident to Nottinghamshire Police, but the force said it could not confirm the incident without a formal report from the victim or her friends.
The Mail tried to contact Pryzm, Rock City, and The Cell multiple time by phone and email, but was unsuccessful.
Stealth nightclub said in a statement: ‘We take all reports of this nature very seriously and will continue to do our utmost to protect our customers’ welfare. Our security will be carrying out an increased number of enhanced searches on entry.’
Lucy, Olivia, Katy and Sophie join the roll call of alleged spiking victims this week, including 19-year-olds Sarah Buckle, who says she was injected in her hand at a Nottingham club, and Zara Owen who alleges she was stabbed in her thigh ‘through thick denim jeans’ at Pryzm.
Students groups from many cities, including Bournemouth, Edinburgh, and Nottingham, will boycott nightclubs over the next fortnight under the banner Girls Night In. This is to improve security and staff training.
The campaign started in Southampton last night and will be spread to 43 universities and cities. An online petition to ‘make it a legal requirement for nightclubs to thoroughly search guests on entry’ has reached almost 160,000 signatures, which means that MPs will be required to debate it in Parliament.
Last night the National Police Chief’s Council revealed there were 24 confirmed reports made to police forces around the country of spiking by ‘some form of injection’, and 140 of drink spiking, across September and October.
2009, I was in my dorm on the morning following my own. I knew instinctively I had not been sexually assaulted, nor had I been robbed, and therefore — naively — did not report the incident.
I told myself that ‘these things happen’ and moved on, considering myself to have had a lucky escape. But today thousands of young women are living in fear amid these horrifying new claims — and we urgently need to know the truth.
*Some names have been changed to protect identities.
Yesterday, a UNIVERSITY student shared the story of how she and two of her friends were spiked with a needle the night before.
Kacey Edgar-Hedges, 18, said she felt a ‘sting’ on her right arm while dancing at a nightclub on Wednesday.
She was unaware of the incident at Swansea’s Fiction venue until one her friends fell ill and was admitted to hospital.
Kacey Edgar-Hedges, 18, said she felt a ‘sting’ on her right arm while dancing at a nightclub on Wednesday
Miss Edgar-Hedges, along with a second friend, left and she noticed her arm throbbing. She added: ‘Then all of a sudden I couldn’t feel my arms at all and I felt really drowsy. My eyes began rolling to the back of my head.’
When she realized her friend was in trouble, other friends called a taxi and took them to the hospital. Paula Williams, her aunt, was 39 years old and told the Daily Mail that the police believed that ketamine, a Class B drug, had been used. However, they are still waiting for results.
Miss Edgar-Hedges said yesterday: ‘I’d literally only read the first reports of needles being used a day before it happened to me. It’s really worrying.’ While she and one of her friends believe they were spiked in the club, the first to go to hospital thinks she was spiked in a bar she had been to before joining them.
South Wales Police said a ‘small number’ of cases were under investigation.