Understand Spiking to Protect Yourself from This Misunderstood Crime
If someone smashes through your window and steals your TV, you know you were robbed. But not all crimes are so obvious. Spiking is a crime that is commonly missed and commonly misunderstood. Defending yourself starts with understanding what it is, why it happens, and what the signs are. Just a few simple steps can help you stay safe and protect your friends.
See Drink Spiking with Dawn Dines for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.
Dawn Dines is the founder of Stamp Out Spiking, a UK charity working to stop spiking through training, resources, and better safeguards in public spaces. She’s been on a mission for the past two decades for stronger prevention, better support for victims, and better legal response. After almost twenty years campaigning, Stamp Out Spiking recently got the UK to recognize spiking as a specific criminal offense. The old law was from 1861, and it desperately needed updated with more current information.
What Spiking Is
Spiking is any time someone puts something (generally a drug of some kind) into your system without your knowledge or consent. Years ago, it used to mostly be putting something in other people’s drinks. A few years ago, the UK had multiple instances of needle spikings, where people either injected others or jabbed them with needles coated in a substance.
Since then, Dawn has heard about it happening with vapes. It’s easy to get vapes laced with other substances on the dark web and people would offer these laced vapes to others. It can also happen through cigarettes in a similar way, or through food in the same way as drinks. Now there’s also something called Devil’s Breath, which is a powder you can blow in someone’s face and affects them through inhaling it.
In its simplest terms, that’s what this crime is. The perpetrator drugs you so they can take advantage of your in some way. The motives vary. Sexual assault, robbery, and blackmail are common ones. But no matter the method or the motive, this crime is about dosing you with a drug to leave you vulnerable.
The Near Misses that Inspired Dawn’s Interest
In 1989, Dawn was staying in Australia as part of an extended trip around the world. One man kept asking her out. She kept declining. Finally, he suggested just grabbing food as friends. Dawn agreed. After they ordered drinks, Dawn went to the restroom. But she forgot her purse. When she came back to the table, she noticed his hand hovering over her drink. She immediately got a gut feeling that he’d done something to her drink. She climbed out the bathroom window and left. Despite how insistent the guy had been, she never saw him again after that night.
A few years later, Dawn was in Mexico with a friend. They went to a restaurant for lunch, and a group of guys sent a tray of cocktails to their table. The two of them took the drinks, and they felt like movie stars with the guys waving at them. But then Dawn saw a look one of the guys gave to the waiter that gave her the same gut feeling. They hadn’t gotten their food yet, but Dawn insisted that the two of them leave. By the time they got back to their apartment, their legs were feeling heavy. They got inside and slept for over thirty hours.
Dawn is grateful that she never found out what either of those perpetrators had planned But the near misses were frightening. They were her first insight into spiking and how it can happen. She’s also glad she listened to her gut feeling. She believes your gut is there for a reason, and listening to it can help you avoid danger.
You’ve got your head, your heart, and your gut, and that gut feeling, you should always rely on it because it’s there for a reason.
Dawn Dines
Spiking Happens More than People Think
When Dawn was done traveling around the world, she came back to the UK. And she started to find out that it had happened to her friends, too. It started a journey to raise awareness and prevent this crime. It’s hard work trying to educate people about something nobody wants to talk about.
Spiking is an absolutely huge problem. When she started, she knew that it sometimes happened in bars and clubs, but didn’t know the full extent. Now we’re even seeing domestic cases, like the case of Gisele Pelicot, where her husband sedated her, brought in other men to rape her, and filmed it. Similar cases have happened in the UK, too.
And the problem is global. Dawn has heard from people as far afield as Botswana, Israel, and New Zealand. It’s just been such an invisible crime. Years ago, Dawn went on Dragons’ Den, the UK equivalent of Shark Tank, and they had no idea what she was talking about. So much of her work has been around raising awareness of what the crime is and how it happens.
Many people assume these kinds of crimes only happen to women, but that’s not the case. It happens to boys and men, too, much more than people assume. From the testimonials Dawn has heard from the survivors of these crimes and their families, she’d estimate about 40% of spiking victims are male. Knowing how important this work is to so many people inspires Dawn to carry on.
We always think that these crimes just happened to females, but that’s not true. This happens to men and boys, probably 60/40.
Dawn Dines
It Isn’t Always Clear After the Fact
Dawn will always remember one girl she met in a nightclub in the south of the UK. She gave her a protective drink cover, and the girl asked what it was. When Dawn explained it was to cover her drink to make it harder for someone to slip something in it, the girl started crying. It turns out that she had been spiked and raped, but when she went home afterwards, her parents and fiancé didn’t believe her. They accused her of getting drunk and going home with the guy.
Dawn runs accredited training courses on spiking, and almost every time, she sees the penny drop for someone. When she explains the crime, she can see the pieces coming together and people realizing what happened to them. The way many of the drugs work, you don’t remember well, if at all, what happened. And because many people don’t know the signs, it’s hard for them to realize that they’ve been affected by this crime.
That’s why one of Dawn’s focuses is on educating people on the symptoms and knowing what it looks like and feels like when it happens. Stamp Out Spiking has lots of training and educational resources for that. Testing kits exist, but they only test for a few drugs – and with new synthetic drugs, it’s almost impossible to test for every drug. Even medically, in the UK many doctors won’t test you for these kinds of drugs unless police instruct them to, and even then, the drugs tend to leave your system quickly. And if the tests aren’t medically authorized, they can get prohibitively expensive fast.
Spiking Drugs Work Quickly
The time from getting spiked to having symptoms varies depending on a lot of factors. In drinks, it’s about twenty minutes after consuming it. But that depends on how much was in the drink, how much of it you drank, your size, how much you had to eat beforehand, and how much else you drank. If it was in a vape or an injection or something else, it can vary even more.
The first sign of being spiked is almost always blurred vision. Most victims report that their vision got blurry and they started to feel really drunk, really fast. A lot of people also wet themselves or vomit because their body wants the poison out as fast as possible. If you start feeling symptoms, you probably have between twenty seconds and a minute before you’re completely incapacitated. It’s important to use that time to find someone trustworthy, tell them what’s going on, and ask them to keep you safe. A staff member or security at the venue, your friends, even calling someone to let them know what’s going on will help. That’s what’s going to keep you safe.
When Dawn talks about covering drinks, people often respond with a dismissive, “Oh, I don’t drink alcohol.” But it doesn’t have to be alcohol. Perpetrators can spike tea or even water, as well as food, cigarettes, and more. Just because you don’t drink alcohol doesn’t mean you can ignore the risks. It can happen to anyone.
Everyone assumes, when we talk about covering drinks and that, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t even drink alcohol” … you can spike a glass of water or a cup of tea.
Dawn Dines
Protect Yourself and Others from Spiking
Ideally, always go out with somebody on “shark watch” who stays sober, drives everyone home, and watches for warning signs. They have a drink with a lid and put the top back on when they’re not actively drinking. They keep an eye on the group so everyone else can relax and have fun. There are also lots of different safety apps out there.
Never leave your drink unattended. Dawn takes her drink to the bathroom – it’s unhygienic, but better than the alternative. If someone offers to buy you a drink, go to the bar with them and watch it being poured. Take away that risk for someone to slip something in. It’s not just drinks, either. Anything shared, like vapes or cigarettes, is also risky. And remember that people you know can commit these crimes too.
Never leave your drinks unattended. If somebody offers to buy you a drink, go to the bar with them, watch it being poured. Just take away the danger element where somebody can do something.
Dawn Dines
There are little things we can all do to help each other. Dawn is a huge advocate for places like bars and restaurants to have training for their staff. Stamp Out Spiking offers online training courses for bar staff. She also advocates awareness posters in bathrooms, since everyone has to go to the bathroom. The most important thing is being vigilant, for yourself and others. Anyone, whether they’re bar staff or not, can notice that someone who came in twenty minutes ago walking fine can now barely stand up. If you see something, tell staff or security – don’t stay quiet.
If anybody sees anybody doing something to somebody else’s drink, please tell the bar staff, please tell security.
Dawn Dines
Spread Awareness
Dawn has been on Good Morning Britain, Crimewatch, the BBC, and practically every radio station in the country. Stamp Out Spiking has been involved in documentaries and ad campaigns. Awareness and information is key to this fight. It’s happening more on a global scale, too, as more people across the world are sharing resources and speaking out. If you want to get involved, don’t hesitate to reach out – Dawn and Stamp Out Spiking want to help protect as many people as possible.
The laws did finally get changed in the UK. Once that change takes effect, Dawn hopes that more of these criminals will get convicted. Sometimes venues can be a bit of a challenge, because they don’t want people to think that spiking happens there. But a customer coming in and spiking other people isn’t the business’s fault. She never names or shames businesses because of that. But she does encourage them to do more to protect customers. Training staff and putting up informational material isn’t hard to do and can go a long way. Just sharing information and awareness so people know this crime is out there and the signs to watch for is hugely helpful.
If you’ve been affected, Dawn wants to hear from you. The door is always open. And the more she hears about the crimes happening, the more she can put into training and the more organizations like Stamp Out Spiking can do to protect people from this crime.
Don’t Let the Criminals Win
When Dawn talks to spiking victims, a lot of them say that they don’t want to go out anymore. But there are things everyone can do now to protect themselves. Not very many business founders want their business shut down, but Dawn would love it if Stamp Out Spiking had to close because these criminals can’t get away with it anymore and spiking is no longer a problem. In the meantime, she’s going to keep up the fight.
Dawn encourages people to be vigilant, but also to go party and have a good time if that’s what they enjoy. She wants people to stay safe, but she doesn’t want victims to change how they live, because then the criminals have won. Take precautions, but go out and have fun. We all only have one life – let’s make it a good one.
Stay safe, but please don’t change your lifestyle, because then these horrible perpetrators have won and that is what we don’t want.
Dawn Dines
Learn more about Stamp Out Spiking and contact Dawn Dines at stampoutspiking.org. You can also purchase drink protectors at stoptopps.com or nightcapit.com.