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Comment by justinsteele | Hacker News Reader

Regarding #3, what data are you going off to say that Rohypnol has not been detected, and that drugging overall is uncommon? I have experienced it twice in the past 18 months through friends whom I have drank with many times, and had a very obvious reaction to one drink which often had been bought for them or left on a table/bar at some point that evening. Unless someone poured them a drink comprised of 6+ shots worth of liquor, there is no way they would have gone through the change they went through in that one drink. Also, if it had been that much alcohol, it would have been noticed in taste.

Uncommon is pretty broad, if something as severe as being drugged happens to one person out of every 200 each night, it is "common" in my mind.

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>> Regarding #3, what data are you going off to say that Rohypnol has not been detected, and that drugging overall is uncommon?

Wikipedia has links to a couple of studies. It says Rohypnol was detected in less than 1% of cases of sexual assault where drugging was suspected.

I obviously have no idea what you and your friends have seen or been through or what they may have been spiked with. I'm just saying that whenever actual figures are looked at the problem of drinks being spiked with drugs turns out to be far, far behind witting or unwitting consumption of alcohol as the reason for people being in a bad way.

This is in NO WAY whatsoever saying it's acceptable to abuse someone who's drunk, or that it's their fault. People should be free to get as trashed as they like without bad people doing bad things to them.

It may very well be that this stuff doesn't get tested or reported very often, in which case the most we can say is we don't have reliable data.

The OP itself describes how the numbers are going to be heavily skewed because of how the drugs get metabolized and how often people don't report...

Right, but it seems to be that even when drugs are suspected and tested for within a pretty rapid time period, most often alcohol is the culprit - http://www.octevaw-cocvff.ca/sites/all/files/pdf/reports/Dru...

Rohypnol in particular should be easy to pick up, Flunitrazepam has a halflife of 18+ hours and at least one metabolite has a halflife of 36-200 hours. In fact according to this - http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/201894.pdf - it can be detected in urine for 5 days and hair for a month.

If people are unlikely to report, or if drugs that are metabolised faster are used then sure, we may not have good data. But then all we can really say is we don't have good data.

You can't use the fact that the numbers will be skewed as evidence that drugging must be common.

> It says Rohypnol was detected in less than 1% of cases of sexual assault where drugging was suspected.

That might not mean what you think it means.

From http://www.drugs.com/rohypnol.html :

> It is difficult to estimate the number of Rohypnol-facilitated rapes in the United States. Very often, biological samples are taken from the victim at a time when the effects of the drug have already passed and only residual amounts remain in the body fluids. These residual amounts are difficult, if not impossible, to detect using standard screening assays available in the United States. If Rohypnol exposure is to be detected at all, urine samples need to be collected within 72 hours and subjected to sensitive analytical tests.

Now, the bit about "sensitive analytical tests" has me pretty worried. We are living in a nation where an awful lot of rape kits collected after the crime of rape are simply put on a shelf because there is no money to process them. I bet that "sensitive analytical tests" aren't even on the menu a lot of times.

Again, at the most that says we don't have good data, however according to wikipedia (and it does seem to be well referenced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape_drug and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape#Drugs_used_in_sexual_...) even studies that are designed to catch this stuff don't seem to get much over 1-2% for rohypnol where alcohol comes in closer to half of cases of suspected drug assisted assault.

I really want to stress that I don't think that in any way diminishes the awfulness of the crime, I just wonder if (like stranger danger) we don't overemphasise the worst-case at the cost of the mundane (people known to the victim, alcohol)

I'm kind of shocked at how bad that infographic on wikipedia is. I don't disagree on any particular point you've made.

Yeah that is pretty damn awful, if only due to heavy compression and artifacting. I've come to expect more from my free encyclopedia :)

The irony is that there is money to test them, you just need to convince female voters to call their representative and tell them that you'd rather they spend war on terrorism money on getting those rape kits processed instead. Considering that a woman is far more likely to be a victim of rape than terrorism, it's absurd that any rape kit ever sit on the shelf untested.

The difference is that they think terrorism victims don't "deserve it" but rape victims do.

Because alleged "awareness campaigns" which focus on the least common risk factors (and there are many such campaigns) are a major annoyance to me: it's well worth reviewing the other study linked here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6122532

And well worth reviewing other literature on results from screenings conducted quickly after a suspected assault.

Focusing on "date rape drugs" presents a vastly inaccurate picture of the real risk factors, not least because it creates an implicit assumption that alcohol and common recreational drugs are not the major risks, when they are far more common and plenty capable of reducing inhibitions or inducing unconsciousness all on their own.

Perhaps a good analogy would be to anti-terror campaigns: we are drawn toward the uncommon and dramatic events, and focus our attention and efforts on them, when far more could be accomplished from dealing with more common but less "flashy" risks.

(another example with rape is the focus on "stranger danger", which creates an implicit assumption of safety in the company of people one already knows, when in fact most rapes are perpetrated by someone known to the victim rather than by strangers who leap from behind bushes)

In defense of "awareness campaigns" (I had a roommate who was a health educator) the statistics about whether one is more likely to be raped by a stranger or an acquaintance are very, very widely reported.

> Focusing on "date rape drugs" presents a vastly inaccurate picture of the real risk factors

I don't disagree but I think a presentation regarding date rape drugs is normally given after alcohol has already been discussed. An educator who discussed date rape drugs first, or in isolation, would most certainly be Doing It Wrong.

A lot of what leads people to that inaccurate picture of the risk factors, I suspect, is the natural human tendency to assume that none of the people I know would ever do something like that. Not to mention the assumption that familiarity with alcohol implies some sort of mastery over it. You can lead a horse to data but you can't make him drink, or something.

There are so many factors that can lead to a temporary increased sensitivity to alcohol that I am skeptical of anecdotal evidence like this, especially when alcohol is involved.

Rohypnol/GHB are certainly used as date rape drugs, but they have an effect that is distinct from just more liquor.

> I have experienced it twice in the past 18 months through friends whom I have drank with many times, and had a very obvious reaction to one drink which often had been bought for them or left on a table/bar at some point that evening. Unless someone poured them a drink comprised of 6+ shots worth of liquor, there is no way they would have gone through the change they went through in that one drink.

Can you elaborate at all? I'm curious because, as disgusting as it is, I can sort of understand the motivation of the standard date rape scenario with Rohypnol. What you're describing sounds more like the equivalent of someone spiking the punch... with Rohypnol? To what end?

Horrifying.

I've had it happen to me as well. I was very young at the time and only had two drinks the entire night. Luckily I was with safe friends, so it could have been worse.

Shockingly once at a party I was offered to buy rohypnol. I was lurid. I certainly don't look like the type of person who would buy drugs, much less from a random stranger...

    > I was lurid.
    > ......^^^^^.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=lurid

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

Oh my. I felt my fingers twitch when I typed that sentence. But alas I only have 30 minutes for lunch as did not budget time for lookup.

Still though, lurid may be an appropriate adjective.

What does the type of person who would buy drugs look like?

Like this guy, obviously: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-D4-VcT-tdyU/T6nfkqfzPNI/AAAAAAAABp...

I can tell you what the type of person who does not buy drugs looks like.

*livid

You know what, as someone interested in everything possible, I probably would have bought some, experimented on myself with it and then flushed anything left. I find the whole area absolutely fascinating.

That's not to say I expect everyone to be like me, but I guess it may go some way to explaining my attitude of "don't blame the drugs, blame the people". ANd now that I write that out I can see how much it looks like something the NRA might say.

It's a tricky area and no doubt.

That's exactly it though, lots of people "experience" being roofied, and then are tested and it turns out they were not. Our "common sense" judgments on situations like this are actually incredibly unreliable.

>Uncommon is pretty broad, if something as severe as being drugged happens to one person out of every 200 each night, it is "common" in my mind.

But evidence suggests it is no where even close to that common. Alcohol on the other hand might very well be used more often than 1 in 200.

>That's exactly it though, lots of people "experience" being roofied, and then are tested and it turns out they were not.

Do you have a link for that?

Toxicological findings in cases of alleged drug-facilitated sexual assault in the United Kingdom over a 3-year period: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16054005

TL;DR: 1014 people claimed they were drugged and sexually assaulted. "In 21 cases (2%), a sedative or disinhibiting drug was detected..." So-called "date rape" drugs were a subset of these cases.

From your source: "Illicit drugs were detected in 344 cases (34%)"

Illicit does not mean unwitting or unwillingly taken.

(Again, no judgement on those that choose to use drugs, I certainly do and I think that drug users are as deserving of protection as anyone else)

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