That evening, I told another close friend. And three of my good friends.” They wanted to know where I’d been, so I told them: Williamsburg. When I told my neighbor, she said, “Oh my God, me too!” Her boyfriend chimed in, “That happened to me, too. You’ll be okay.” Then he said, “This has already happened to two of my close guy friends.” “Sounds like it was close, but you woke up. “If you had gotten a lethal dose, you would have never woken up,” he told me. Am I dying? Should I try to get to a hospital?” “My heart is palpitating and my hand-eye coordination doesn’t work and it feels like if I stop concentrating on breathing I’ll stop breathing. It was an effort to form coherent sentences. “I feel like I’m dying,” I told him, seriously. (GHB, the most likely culprit, actually is lethal in the wrong doses.) I called a doctor friend who specializes in emergency medicine. “You would do things, but you weren’t there,” he said. This was what unnerved him the most in the retelling: how pliable I had been. He told me I should drink water, and I wordlessly accepted the cup. When I finally emerged, he suggested I sit down, and I sat. He took me back to his apartment to put me to bed, but I managed to lock myself in his bathroom for 30 minutes and either wouldn’t or couldn’t respond to his attempts to coax me out. Apparently, I’d grown radiantly happy and then quickly, dramatically incapacitated. My knowledge of the interim is pieced together mostly from what he told me. Twelve hours after being drugged, I woke up shaking in John’s bed, fully clothed, and on top of the covers. Granholm, then Michigan’s attorney general: ” an extremely high priority, in that this substance has popped up at these rave parties, and kids can’t detect it in a drink.” The portrait painted here was consistent with everything else I’d heard: The victims were “kids,” almost exclusively young women the dosing was sexually predatory in motive and it was possibly avoidable if you skipped “these rave parties.” I also assumed, because it was something I didn’t hear much about, that it just wasn’t very common anymore. In the New York Times article about Clark’s death there was a quote from Jennifer M. Until recently, I held certain unexamined assumptions about how drug assault worked, acquired through guidance-counselor lectures and osmosis of stories like Samantha Clark’s, a 16-year-old who died in 1999 from a dose of GHB someone put in her drink at a party. The drugs aren’t the only things that have changed without much notice. It is probably no longer accurate to say “She was roofied” - but then “She was midazolamed” lacks a certain something. These days, the drugs slipping out of pockets and into highball glasses all over New York are primarily GHB (or “liquid Ecstasy”), Zolpidem (also known as Ambien), scopolamine, and a few lesser-known benzodiazepines, like temazepam or midazolam. Only 1 in 100 victims who go for blood work test positive for rohypnol. But as it happens, no one actually gets dosed with an actual roofie anymore. To start, the terminology is the same: Roofie as a noun and verb (as in, “I got roofied last night,” or “He slipped her a roofie”) is a slangy riff on the name of the most popular “date rape drug” circa 1999, rohypnol. Public understanding of illicit, nonconsensual drugging hasn’t changed meaningfully in more than a decade. These were the simple measures of insurance we should take to avoid becoming one of the unlucky - so simple, actually, that the subtext of those lectures tended to sound like “Don’t be stupid.” (There was also the suggestion, sometimes subtextual and sometimes explicit, that the best and smartest of us would just avoid “getting ourselves” in “these situations” altogether.) Many of us, especially if we were young women, sat through lectures in which we were directed never to go out alone or leave a glass vulnerable to tampering. Most twenty- and thirtysomethings in New York grew up in the age of the “date rape drug” and “roofies.” The practice of surreptitiously dosing people at parties or bars hit national headlines roughly 15 years ago and was framed as a “pandemic,” so we heard on the news as often as we heard from our guidance counselors about girls who went out, took a drink from a stranger, and then woke up with no memory and no underwear. This story will not be entirely unfamiliar. I Was Raped, and I Stayed Silent About My ‘Coveted Status’
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