Another day, another law. Spiking – adding drugs or alcohol to someone else’s drink without their permission – is to be made a specific criminal offence, the Government has revealed. The new offence would mean that perpetrators ‘feel the full force of the law’, according to the Prime Minister, as part of the Government’s’ crackdown on violence against women and girls’.
While this sounds impressive, it’s not altogether clear why it is necessary. For, according to the Metropolitan Police, spiking is already against the law:
Spiking is illegal and carries a sentence of up to ten years in prison… spiking offences are covered by more than one law. Most spiking cases are offences under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. This covers the use of harmful substances. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 covers cases where someone spikes a victim to sexually assault them.
I guess that it may be felt that passing a new law will act as a signal of intent to deal with what is seen as a major problem, and so it’s worth doing.
And on the face of it, the incidence of spiking seems high, and possibly increasing. A YouGov poll in 2022 reported that 10% of women and 5% of men said they had been spiked. The following year a Drinkaware survey suggested that 13% of adult females, and a frankly surprising 9% of adult males, thought that they had been a victim of drink spiking.
But are these high rates altogether plausible, particularly when you bear in mind that a high proportion of young people, especially those from Muslim backgrounds and those living well outside major population centres, rarely if ever go near crowded clubs and bars?
There are very few instances of anybody being actually spotted spiking a drink – which is likely to be quite difficult given that people don’t tend to leave drinks unattended for long – and the motivation for the supposed act is often unclear, as the police admit. The claims to have suffered from spiked drinks are subjective, and are usually reported – if they are reported at all – the next morning.
The medical evidence for widespread spiking is slim. One BMJ study of 75 patients attending a Wrexham hospital alleging drink spiking over a three-year period found that most tested negative for drugs. The paper concluded that the patients’ symptoms were ‘more likely to be a result of excess alcohol’. A more recent larger-scale study in Berlin concluded that ‘considering toxicological and police findings, the reported prevalence and perceived likelihood of spiking seem to be highly overestimated’.
Many people may have woken up after a bad night of binge drinking, perhaps in a strange location and with little memory of the night’s debauchery. For some, drink-spiking may be a convenient rationalisation.
There are certainly some real incidents of drink-spiking, but the media likely tend to exaggerate from a handful of cases. There may be something else. Pressure groups can have an interest in exaggerating the significance of spiking. For example Drinkaware, a spinoff from the alcohol company-financed Portman Group, has pushed the spiking narrative. Booze merchants clearly have an interest in asserting that unpleasant experiences after heavy nights out are not the sadly inevitable result of over-indulgence in their product, but rather the result of mysterious bad actors doctoring people’s drinks.
Be that as it may, this new legislation is unnecessary. If a genuine incident of spiking is found, the law is already adequate. It will be expensive to prepare and push a cosmetic new bill through Parliament. If it places new obligations on pub managers and bar staff, as usually follows with this sort of thing, costs will be raised still further for the battered hospitality industry.
If Keir Starmer wants to signal support for females he might be better employed setting out a clearer understanding of who women and girls are, and perhaps insisting that more police are deployed to enforce existing laws in our night-time economy.
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