Every few years in the city I live in there's a sudden uptick in reports of drinks getting spiked at local bars. I've seen the mere suggestion that there's a risk of heightened risk of getting roofied at a bar make otherwise intelligent people paranoid or start using it as an excuse for their over-indulgence. And of course, there is never any concrete evidence - nothing shows up in bloodwork, nobody is ever caught doing it... the chatter just eventually fades away.
This is obviously a different situation, but I'm weary of the massive scope this has taken on with so little concrete evidence that anything was actually happening. Maybe I'm totally wrong, or maybe it was a real phenomenon that many others hitched onto later on (seems even more plausible.) The point is that we seem to increasingly discount how much incentives and social dynamics play a role in situations like this.