NIGHTCLUB NEEDLE PANIC
Fearful clubbers report being injected with drugs and blacking out
With the start of the new university term this autumn, we have seen the return of a classic fortean phenomenon – mysterious needle attacks. There has been a wave of reports that people in nightclubs have been injected with drugs that cause them to black out, causing sufficient concern that the Home Secretary Priti Patel and the Commons Home Affairs Committee have asked to be kept informed of developments.
The most prominently reported incident involved Zara Owen, 19, who visited a nightclub in Nottingham on 10 October and blacked out shortly after arriving, despite apparently drinking less than usual. The next thing she says she remembers is waking up in her bed with a pain in her leg. On examining her leg, she found a mark that looked like a pinprick, causing her to conclude that she had been injected with something. She said: “As a young person who’s at university, I’m hearing stories of people who have been to nightclubs and they have been injected… so this kind of gave me an idea this had happened to me.” Another student, who wished to remain anonymous, said she felt a “pinch on the back of her arm” as she was leaving another Nottingham nightclub, then blacked out, leading her to believe that she, too, had been injected with a drug. In all, Nottinghamshire police have received 12 reports from nightclubbers who believed they had been injected with a drug on a night out in the city, having experienced blackouts and memory loss and feeling a pinch or finding a mark on their bodies. None, though, had actually seen an assailant, or a syringe, nor were there any witnesses to the alleged attacks. Victims have reported being injected in the hand, the leg and in at least one case, in Liverpool, the back. Nottinghamshire Police did arrest two men in relation to the alleged offences after they were seen acting suspiciously in the city centre and they are on conditional bail while investigations continue, but as yet police have not announced that they have concrete evidence, beyond possessing drugs, that would link the men to needle attacks.
Similar reports have been received from across the country in recent weeks, perhaps explained by the return of student life after lockdown, with new students being potentially unwary because pandemic restrictions mean they have had less clubbing experience than usual. As well as in Nottingham, incidents have been reported from London, Birmingham, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee, Glasgow, Exeter and Liverpool, although police do not see these incidents as linked and Merseyside Police said they could find no evidence “that any criminality occurred”. Some forces, though, have said they are considering deploying plainclothes officers in nightclubs to combat the threat. There has been a call for a one-day boycott of nightclubs in protest, clubbers have taken to going out in thick denim to make it harder for needles to pierce their clothes and there has been a petition calling for nightclubs to physically search everyone entering.
Those with drug expertise, however, are sceptical about the reports. David Caldicott, an emergency medicine consultant and founder of drug testing project WEDINOS, said: “The technical and medical knowledge required to perform this would make it deeply improbable. It’s really hard to stick a needle in someone without them noticing, especially if you have to keep the needle in there for long enough, maybe 20 seconds, to inject enough drugs to cause this,” adding that “it is at the level of a state-sponsored actor incapacitating a dissident, like the Novichok incident (see FT365:2, 5; 366:5, 14). The idea that a clubber would do this to a fellow clubber seems highly unlikely to me.” Guy Jones, senior scientist at drugs charity the Loop, agreed, saying that any drug capable of creating the effects reported, such as GHB, which has a reputation as a “date rape” drug, would need to be administered in large quantities with thick needles and would be easily detectable
Examining her leg, she found a mark that looked like a pinprick
for days after in a toxicology screening. They said it was far more likely the women have had their drinks spiked and then injured themselves while under the drug’s influence.
Attacks like these have a long history, going back to at least the 18th century. A classic of the genre is the story of “The London Monster”, who terrorised young women on the streets of the capital in 1790, slashing their petticoats and wounding them in the buttocks or thighs with a sharp instrument. In this case, exhaustively chronicled by FT’s Jan Bondeson in his 2004 book The London Monster (and in FT391:32-37), an arrest and prosecution followed, but later examples of phantom stabbers and the panics that ensued have proven tougher to solve.
The French “Piqueur” panic of 1819 involved reports of women being stabbed in the buttocks and thighs by needles, rapidly escalating to claims of attacks with poisoned needles. This spread to other major French cities including Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille and Calais – and abroad to Brussels and Augsburg – before the panic died down in early 1820, although there were brief resurgences in 1822 and 1823. In the 1910s, in the US, there was a widespread belief that “needle men” were injecting vulnerable young women in nightclubs with drugs such as morphine, or even exotic South American arrow poisons, so they could abduct them into a life of prostitution, a legend that persisted well into the 1930s without anyone actually being caught committing such acts. In Italy, in 1932, Trieste was gripped with fear of the “ManWasp”, a mysterious individual who was allegedly stabbing women in the buttocks with a needle, resulting in several men nearly getting lynched and one enterprising individual trying to patent under-skirt armour. “Man-Wasp” panics recurred across Italy in various cities until at least 1941, by which time Italians had more pressing things to worry about. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were persistent rumours of people being given AIDS as a result of being pricked with pins coated in HIV-infected blood, again in nightclubs. These morphed into viral emails and social media posts once Internet use became more widespread, despite the US Center for Disease Control investigation finding no evidence that any attacks had ever taken place. More recently, in 2015, there was a spate of needle attack reports from India, again without any assailants or syringes being found. Just as the rumours of HIV-infected pins probably had their roots in advice to drug addicts not to share needles because of the risk of crossinfection, it may be that the current fear of being injected with drugs in nightclubs has its roots in warnings about the very real threat of “spiked” drinks – with the “spike” taking on a literal form. For other phantom attackers, see also FT131:32-38, 148:8-9, 163:7, 164:6, 310:40-41 and Michael Goss, The Halifax Slasher: An Urban Terror in the North of England, Fortean Times Occasional Paper, 1987. BBC News, Guardian, 19 Oct; mirror. co.uk, 20 Oct; dailymail.co.uk, 21 +24 Oct 2021.