Needle spiking gained traction in Europe: What travelers should know
“Ow!”
Micaela looked alarmed when she turned to me at the bar and told me she thought she might have been needle spiked, or injected with drugs.
Prior to her move to London in September for graduate school, my friend Micaela, 27, received a warning from a friend in Germany about the prevalence of spiking throughout Europe – either by slipping a drug into a drink or injecting drugs into someone’s body with a hypodermic needle.
The phenomena of needle spiking gained attention across the United Kingdom during a “sudden increase across the country in October 2021,” according to a recent report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee.
Micaela, whose last name isn’t included due to the nature of her experience, hadn’t even taken a sip of her drink when she felt the jab in her hip. But she knew something was wrong within five minutes. She became woozy, dizzy and couldn’t see straight. She immediately told me that she wasn’t feeling well.
Micaela doesn’t remember what happened after that, but she suddenly collapsed to the floor among a group of partiers standing in a semi-circle around her limp body. She woke up quickly, but fearing a stranger would pick her up, I scooped my arms under her shoulders and carried her to the exit.
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Who is targeted by needle spiking?
Two types of spiking are prevalent: Drink spiking, where someone puts drugs or alcohol into a person’s drink without consent, and needle spiking, where someone stealthily injects the victim.
With drink spiking, it could include putting alcohol into a non-alcoholic drink, or adding drugs, like tranquilizers, amphetamines or others.
“This is an explosive cocktail,” said Marco Antonio Jiménez, a criminologist and police officer with the Mossos d’Esquadra in Spain, where dozens of needle-spiking cases have been reported so far this year.
The motive behind needle-spiking doesn’t seem always to be sexual assault, Jiménez said. People seem to be targeted for a robbery, or for the sake of instilling intimidation and fear, he said.
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U.K. police data shows needle incidents typically involve female students in their twenties and occurred in pubs, clubs and festivals, although house parties also pose a risk because perpetrators can feel empowered by a lack of surveillance. However, this is not just a “girl’s problem,” said Colin Mackie, co-founder of Spike Aware UK, an organization raising awareness of the issue since 2017. Mackie’s son Greg passed away in a spiking-related incident in 2017.
In a 2021 YouGov survey, 11% of women and 6% of men in the UK said they had been spiked.
“I felt embarrassed,” said Oscar Buss, 18, who says he was needle-spiked in Watford, England, in August. “People didn’t believe me.” When the doctor wasn’t convinced Buss, a man, could have been spiked, a male nurse who said he had once…
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