I'm a male. I recently had my Pepsi spiked, and I knew it straight away, but I was being held at knife-point at the time so could do little about it. I didn't expect to be drugged while being kidnapped forcibly. You expect it even less in a pub, but it is becoming so common you should learn to expect it. Never leave your drink unprotected - not for a second. Take it to the toilets with you.

There are a lot a lot of new drugs that can render you vunerable depending on the dosage. Mostly, they have letters and numbers but no real name. And if you want to self-medicate yourself with them, I have no objection or complaint, I'm not a moralist Maybe a little moralist, I am not going to reveal all I know on these pages because I know some of the people who read here can't be trusted with the information. Read Erowid, search the press.

Even simple Chloroform is debilitating in the short term, and can kill if overdosed. Once, when I was a teenager, my friends spiked my drink with acid. They meant no harm and took care of me, it was a 'gift'. I would have willingly taken it anyway. I could see the funny side. Acid is totally debilitating in the short term - and in the long term in excesss. If I had a choice of drugs to use as a weapon against someone, I wouldn't choose acid, there are new kids off the block.

In my own home town though there has been a spate of date rapes, almostly always on teenage girls. Most go unreported. The drugs leave your body the first time you urinate, no current test will identify them after that. So basically there is no way to report it to the police, and the police don't like to chase difficult cases. You can endure the greatest ordeal and the police will label it as 'an unsubstatiated alleged assauly without corroborating witnesses'. Which hardly endears you to the police. 'If I wasn't an anarchist before then I would be now'.

The mainstream newspapers have recently attacked the still legal drugs. The illegal drugs are more widely available than marijuana or ecstasy in my town, which shows how fucked up we all are. Kids are quitting the local drugs due to the number of drug-attacks.

So. Well I won't back the moral clampdown on all drugs, that 'war' just makes things worse. And I can't condemn the drugs,they could be beneficial to some people. This is an 'older person lecture'. If someone wants to spike you then you won't know about it in advance. Take even your soft drinks with you at all times - take your pint to the toilet, take your coffee upstairs with you. Don't drink anything that you haven't kept with you all the time. There really is an 'epidemic' just now and you won't be being paranoid.

A bigger moral question is what to do when you see a pretty girl in a bad-state being frog-marched out of a pub by young guys. I've seen this before and let it slip, chalked it up to E, convinced myself they were her friends. Lately, no, I can't go for that.

Intervene. Call the cops if you are alone and aren't big enough to do something yourself. That could be your sister.