I’m a drink-spike victim too, says Tory minister
A MINISTER has called for more action to stop drinks-piking after revealing she was herself a victim on a night out.
Mims Davies said she blacked out and had to be carried home after finding a strange object in her drinks glass.
She has now written to Home Secretary Priti Patel asking what more can be done to restrict the sale of substances that can have such dangerous effects.
Her comments come amid a surge in reports of women who say their drinks have been tampered with – and some who believe they have been injected with drug-filled needles in nightclubs.
Mrs Davies, 46, a junior employment minister, said her ordeal happened during a night out in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, two years ago. ‘I found something black in the bottom of my drink,’ she recalled. I pulled it out and didn’t really think anything of it and threw it on the floor,’ she told the BBC. It was only later on I thought, “Blimey, what was that?”’ She said she has only a partial memory of the rest of the evening because she blacked out, adding: ‘It was absolutely awful. I had to be carried home.’
Although she got home safely, she still has no idea what had been placed in her glass.
Mrs Davies, Tory MP for Mid Sussex, went on: ‘We should be restricting who on earth can get hold of these products, as we would in any other sphere.
‘What on earth is in those products? Who’s buying them and who’s sourcing them? There’s more to this than meets the eye.’
Drink-spiking was raised in the House of Commons on Wednesday as MPs asked what the Government
is doing to tackle the growing problem. Home Office Minister Rachel Maclean agreed: ‘Drink spiking and needle spiking are horrific and frightening offences.’
She said the Home Secretary was working with police chiefs to ‘ramp up our response’.
And she said the Home Office was funding trials of new kits which would enable nightclubs to test drinks and discover if they had in fact been spiked.
Slipping alcohol or drugs into someone else’s drink to incapacitate them is illegal, even if intended as a prank. It carries a maximum jail sentence of ten years, which can be extended further if the drugging leads to a robbery or sexual assault. One of the most common substances used is so-called party drug GHB, which is now being upgraded to Class B after what the Home Secretary called its ‘truly sickening’ use.
GHB was used by student Reynhard Sinaga to drug and sexually assault 48 men in his flat in Manchester. Last year he was jailed for a minimum of 30 years.
Online sellers say Britain has become one of their ‘top destinations’ for sales of GHB and Rohypnol, another so-called ‘date-rape’ drug. Both drugs are illegal in the UK without a prescription but are sold openly on the internet.
Daily Mail investigators were offered them prescription-free by four separate dealers, who promised secure delivery in vacuumsealed packages ‘so no one can detect what’s inside’ to anywhere in the UK in as little as 24 hours.
‘I found something in bottom of glass’