New Nail Polish Alerts Wearers To Date Rape Drugs 595
stephendavion writes Checking to see if your drink has been tampered with is about to get a whole lot more discreet. Thanks to the work of four North Carolina State University undergrads, you'll soon be able to find out without reaching for a testing tool. That's because you'll already have five of them on each hand. The team — Ankesh Madan, Stephen Gray, Tasso Von Windheim, and Tyler Confrey-Maloney — has come up with a creative and unobtrusive way to package chemicals that react when exposed to Rohypnol and GHB. They put it in nail polish that they're calling Undercover Colors.
The world we live in. (Score:5, Insightful)
The world we live in. (Score:2, Insightful)
We don't have to. The better solution would be to use cups that are covered and not set them down after being filled.
As far as this technology goes, it might cut down on those particular drugs being used, but I doubt they're the only ones that people use.
Re:Seriously, we're not rapists.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it might be that you respond this way when no one accused you of it.
Methinks the not-lady doth protest too much.
Discreet? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: The world we live in. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm willing to bet strait alcohol is the most common one.
I wish we didn't need something like this (Score:5, Insightful)
C'mon guys, knock this shit off already!
Re:The world we live in. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm trying to come up with a way to point out that the world is fully of humans doing all sorts of awful things to each other, without it seem like condoning the date rapists as being "not so bad" or whatever.
I couldn't. Because there's something uniquely shitty about disabling and taking advantage of someone who's already going on a date with you. They went out of their way to spend time with you, and you just go "not good enough" and betray the hell out of them.
Re:Seriously, we're not rapists.... (Score:4, Insightful)
And obviously that's what they're suggesting here, that you and me and every other guy on the planet is despicable scum.
Has it ever occurred to you that this is a valid and common concern? It's ridiculous that women have to go through such lengths to feel safe going out. But the current reality is that it IS necessary. Not because you yourself might spike their drink, but the chance that someone might is high enough, and the result is horrific enough, that products like this are the necessity.
And instead of sympathizing with that, you decided to make this about how you personally feel slighted that anyone would suggest there's a need for this.
Re:Discreet? (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes 2 seconds with your back turned to get a drink spiked. The level of responsibility you're demanding is beyond human. Unless you spend your entire night focusing on nothing but your beverage(which I gotta say, is worse than dunking your finger in your drink occasionally), that's not going to work.
Re:A few issues with this... (Score:5, Insightful)
to dip one fingertips into a well stirred (and presumably mostly full) drink could be very discreetly done. and i dont think hygienics should be an issue (esp with the alcohol content.) and if a girls fingertips are so grody she feels the hygiene is too rough, well.. then she may have bigger issues.
Re:I wish we didn't need something like this (Score:0, Insightful)
He's not ashamed of his gender, just assholes like you.
Allergies... Can they expand the detection? (Score:4, Insightful)
I know a lot of folks with allergies and diet sensitivities. Wheat, Gluten, Dairy, Casein, Soy, Peanuts, Tree Nuts, Shellfish, etc... A detector like this could be really useful if the detected compounds were expanded.
Re:The world we live in. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a clever bit of science, but unfortunately, I fear the young ladies who are most likely in need of this product are probably not going to have the foresight to wear it. If they had such foresight in the first place, it seems like perhaps they wouldn't be in a position where someone they shouldn't trust could surreptitiously slip them drugs in their drinks.
I'm not "blaming the victim", mind you. No should be subject to drugging and rape regardless of circumstances, and the perps and deserve all the wrath our legal system can throw at them. I'm just pointing out that some people are more prone to making poor life choices. I'm sure we've all met them before. We feel really bad when these people are eaten by wolves, but we can't help but thinking: "was it really the best idea to go out in a suit made of meat and barbeque sauce?"
The big problem is that if you're drugged, you may not be in a suitable state of mind to fight off a would-be rapist even if you know you've been drugged. The best defense is, as always, for women to watch out for their friends when at bars and parties. Don't go wandering off alone after heavy drinking with a guy you don't know or trust. That's asking for trouble in about a million different ways. Drugged drinks are just another type of potential trouble among many.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: The world we live in. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to say no to liquor is extremely easy.
Being able to say no to GHB that's been slipped into your drink isn't.
Re:I wish we didn't need something like this (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just people who have serious mental defects, it's people who might otherwise be normal human beings. It's what some people call "rape culture", the fact that a lot of guys don't really see anything particularly wrong with pressuring girls for sex or treating them as disposable sex objects so it isn't that much of a leap to go as far as drugging them. I mean, if plying them with alcohol so they are less inhibited is okay...
Once you become away of it you start to notice how prevalent it is in western culture. A few years ago there was an advert for pain medication where a women told her husband she didn't want sex that night because she had a headache. The guy produces the pills, "problem" solved, and the woman looks... Well, in all honestly the actress looked like she was resigned to being raped that night, by the look on her face. Going back much further if you watch this scene from Goldfinger [youtu.be] it's supposed to be... romantic? but Bond basically forces her to have sex with him.
Women are often portrayed as either wanting this behaviour or as deserving it. Female characters tend to be manipulative, using their looks and the promise of sex to get what they want. It gives guys the impression that if they meet a girl, she is attractive and dresses in anything lower cut that a turtleneck, she is trying to manipulate them. If they go along with it and maybe buy her a drink or two they have "paid" and expect something in return. Changing her mind or wanting to go slowly is just a rip-off.
It's really screwed up when you start to look at it.
Re:In 14 years practising emergency medicine (Score:3, Insightful)
Because fearmongering about dirty, nasty predatory men is a lot more politically palatable than talking to young women about making bad choices and the consequences thereof. That's "substantiating the patriarchy".
The public narrative is about "victimization" not about "stupidity and carelessness".
Don't get me wrong, a man who takes advantage of a girl who's drunk is just as much a scumbag shit as someone who takes advantage of a girl who's been drugged.
But... I know that if I left my car running with the keys in it, even if the guy that (almost inevitably) would steal it should & would be prosecuted, simultaneously the insurance company isn't going to replace my car because of my own stupid choices.
Just sayin'.
Re:Seriously, we're not rapists.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Neo-Feminist standard tactics: All men are savages. Because looking at actual facts would expose them for the hate-preachers and frauds they are.
Re: The world we live in. (Score:0, Insightful)
Re: The world we live in. (Score:4, Insightful)
I know someone who had roofies used on her.
It's far more likely that you know someone who claims that happened to her. She may even believe it. It's far more likely though, that she drank more than she wants to admit.
Do know who many women are raped each year on campuses in the US?
Yes, and according to the FBI, it's a hell of a lot fewer than you and your fellow SJWs pretend.
Re: The world we live in. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you're a completely stupid fuck. For one thing I know someone who had roofies used on her. She knew a member of the frat since they were little kids and he still pulled a "bros before hoes" on her. (Yes I know he was probably the rapist.) I have also stumbled on someone in downtown Portland who had been given something. Had one drink and she couldn't walk properly. Roofies are not a "moral panic block", they are widely available, tasteless and odorless drug used by sociopaths to rape people. Do you read the news? Do know who many women are raped each year on campuses in the US? Take your useless, ignorant, thoughtless, opinion and have some frat boy tape it to his dick and shove it up your ass and see what you "think" about it then.
The point the parent was trying to make you asked right back in the form of a question. Yes, we know how many women (and men, sexist much?) are raped each year on campuses. Care to tell me what percentage of those involved anything other than straight alcohol? Yeah, I thought so.
Yes, we all know it's a problem, it's simply not anywhere near as powerful or prevelant in rape culture as you or anyone else make it out to be. Alcohol is a drug. Why is it people seem to forget that, or excuse it because they don't want it to interfere with their chosen lifestyle? Isn't it ironic when everything is bad and evil except when it's a vice of yours. Easiest solution to avoid this? Don't consume drugs. Of any kind. That would include your beloved precious fucking alcohol and your lame-ass excuses to keep drinking it in order to have a "good time".
Re:The world we live in. (Score:4, Insightful)
Acquaintance rape seems like an unplanned thing that happens over alcohol.
While this is the stereotype, the truth is that normal acquaintances are not rapists, and rapists often stalk their victims, becoming their acquaintances, testing boundaries, and then attacking.
Re:The world we live in. (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you, but that is exactly what you are doing. You are also claiming that only woman without much brains or ability to think for themselves and plan ahead like to have a good time in public.
Re:Seriously, we're not rapists.... (Score:1, Insightful)
But that is a societal problem.
Re:Seriously, we're not rapists.... (Score:5, Insightful)
But that is a societal problem.
So is the need for this product.
Re:Seriously, we're not rapists.... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, jerk. Nothing here says "All men are savages". That's all in your mind. Some men are savages, and women need every level of protection against them possible. This story is about one new form of protection.
I guess the real question is: why do you feel threatened by a new date rape prevention tool?
Do you get equally offended when Toyota adds a new interior airbag?
Do you assume that Toyota is telling you that *you are a terrilbe driver?
How about when you're operating system alerts you to a new security update?
Is Microsoft or Redhat telling you that you can't keep your computer safe?
Why would this story be any different?
Re: The world we live in. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know a guy, a former friend (basically because he does this kind of shit) that will meet a girl at a bar or club, take her to a table that has no visibility of the bar, and buy himself a beer and her a drink. Innocent enough, just buying a girl a drink, right? Well, his game, and the reason why the table must not be able to see the bar, is that he keeps buying her drinks, bringing his beer with him on every trip to the bar (he never lets the waitress bring drinks), but, instead of getting himself another beer, he gets a glass of water and refills his empty beer bottle before returning to the table. She thinks he's drinking as much as him, making him less of a threat.
Scum. Absolute scum. After I learned what he was doing (he was proud of it when he told me) I did tell a few bartenders at places he was known to frequent but they didn't seem to care, which, I suppose, makes them scum, as well.
Re: The world we live in. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wish we didn't need something like this (Score:4, Insightful)
No need to paint the male gender as a whole as being filled with sociopaths. It's just the law of large numbers at work. There's maybe 30 million American men in the age rage that are likely to pick up srange women; if just 1/10 % of them are sociopathic predators that's 30,000 predators; and since they *are* predators they'll be overrepresented in young women's encounters with men in pick-up scenarios. Small numbers can produce disproportionate problems. In this case it represents numbers the actions of such a small proportion of men that our ideas about how normal people act aren't a reliable guide.
Drink spiking is a very rare crime. Most studies that look for evidence of it find very little. The highest I found was a government study which found date rape drugs in 4.5% of the cases from four sexual assault clinics. Note this is 4.5% of the cases where the assault occurred, so we're not talking about 4.5% of encounters, we're talking 4.5% of rapes. 4.5% is certainly high enough to be a concern in certain situations, like residential parties at a college. In such a situation a date rape drug detector might actually have some utility, even though it addresses relatively rare actions by a tiny proportion of men.
A bigger concern than what we think of as a "date rape drug" is alcohol itself. The same study that found date rape drugs in 4.5% of sexual assault samples found alcohol in 55%. This result is consistently found across studies: alcohol is very frequently associated with sexual assault -- around half of the time. This is especially concerning because some people (men and women both) don't believe that surreptitiously incapacitating someone with alcohol in order to have sex is rape. They don't distinguish ethically between two people getting drunk and having sex and one of them slipping extra alcohol into a drink.
But the fact remains most men wouldn't do something like that. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that a woman might often encounter the few remaining men who would. A typical man has sex with a small number of women many times; a man who has sex with a large number of women only once is bound to be encountered by women disproportionately often.
Re:Seriously, we're not rapists.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the main point is to prevent the woman from drinking the spiked drink. I think it is rather unlike that a guy gets convicted (or even prosecuted) based solely on this test. Perhaps arrested, but more likely just questioned. Unless he's black, in which case he would probably be shot by the police, but that's a problem which has nothing to do with this product.
Re:The world we live in. (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
Looking over the USDOJ stats, it seems Rohypnol is a regional problem with relatively low use count. In many places it is listed as "the least accessible date-rape drug", in other regions it is a suspected factor in hundreds of rape cases. The numbers show it going from about 1000 suspected cases nationally in 1997 to it's modern level of being suspected use in 1.5% of rape cases, a few thousand cases per year. Consider: how many hundreds of thousands of dates where a drink is consumed are there every year? Millions of drinks? Hundreds of millions of drinks? On a per-drink basis the number of uses is a very small percentage. Since it is small as a percentage that suggests going after bigger percentages for the bigger reductions.
While any number bigger than 0 is a problem, as a statistic these two drugs are not used in a high percentage of rapes, and date rapes themselves are relatively rare. I'm not trying to trivialize it. As the parent post suggests, a very rare problem does not lend itself to a TSA-like drug test where millions of drinks are tested for something detectable only a few thousand times annually at a maximum. My rough estimate is around 100M drinks across the nation over the course of a year, roughly 3000 testable contaminated drinks, so 0.0003% of date drinks, or one in every 30,000. That's a lot of useless fingernail-dips.
I suppose if you do go that route, of the new products this one [drinksavvy.com] that continuously monitors your drink by the cup and straw changing color seems much better than nail polish you need to dip frequently. It is both passive and continuous. Someone could slip the drug in after you dunk your fingernail, but the sensor on the container or the straw is 'always on'.
Re:Seriously, we're not rapists.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Last summer, I had on one early Sunday morning fare (a woman), tell me how her friend walked out of the Southampton Social Club (near the Southampton Lirr train station) the Saturday night before after feeling 'strange', and fell onto the club's driveway, face first, slightly (thank God) cutting up her face. The young woman managed to call her friend (my passenger) who drove and picked her up. No police were summoned, and as I've learned since, it wouldn't have mattered much, since the Southampton Police in L.I. do not even have a 'rape kit' available to them.
One other episode was this (2014) summer: Early one morning (5:30 am), I was dispatched to a local, S.Hampton call to a (very expensive, not unusual for the vicinity) home. After getting admittance through the gated driveway, two beautiful young women got in. One was sick and 'out of it', though her friend was much more in control of herself, and gave me the info needed to get them to where they needed to go (a temporary summer rental home). The other young woman was a really cute, vulnerable type young lady, who I could tell, was not feeling very well. During our trip she needed a plastic 'barf bag' that I supplied her with. And her friend told me how she suspected that her friend got 'roofied' by one of the residents of the home. Very plausible allegation, to my mind. I did my job and delivered both of them safely to their destination. A few days later I was called to their address to take both of them to the train station so they could leave Southampton. On the trip we spoke little, other than me asking the young lady if she was alright, she quietly said she was, though I had a very bad feeling that she was molested that day. As their cab driver, there wasn't a damn thing I could do to help them, excepting safely delivering them where they wanted to go. It's a shitty, powerless feeling for a man.
Some 5 years ago I was roofied myself, by a supposed 'friend'. Within a 30 minute period after eating a drug laced slice of pizza, I felt quite 'odd', and left the home of my 'friend'. I walked over 2 miles to get back to my rented room, needing to stop on the way to throw up the pizza I'd ingested. The final, 3 story climb up the stairs to my room were the most difficult, I was forcibly pulling my body up the stairs by gripping the stairway's banister, and I'm a somewhat strong man. As soon as I got inside my room and locked my door behing me I collapsed onto my bed, and for the next six hours I slept the sleep of the dead. Woke up knowing this was not a normal thing to happen to me, and deduced that I must have been 'roofied'. I wanted at the time to go back and kill that guy who I know did that to me. I didn't do that. One day I went there, knocked on his door (acting normal), and made sure that I got my belongings out of storage from his garage. As I walked away, his last words to me were, "You need a psychiatrist!" (I had just began walking away from him down his driveway while carrying my packed up bags).
At those words I almost froze, intent on wanting to drop my bags, and go walk up to him (my 'former' friend), and clock him a good one in his face. I didn't do that though, my intent was just to get away from the asshole without police involvement and my meager, but important to me, belongings intact. Instead of doing that, I remember my steps hesitating a small bit, but I instead kept on walking away from him, despite my wanting so much to stop, go back and smash his face in for what I knew he had done to me.
Now, I am a somewhat strong guy who is non-violent by nature, though I am capable of violence, when pushed too far. I mentally 'chose' not to act upon my 'baser instincts'. I 'thought' through it as it was happening, kno
Re: The world we live in. (Score:4, Insightful)
frat is just an abbreviation for fraternity. What is the distinction you are trying to make?
And they have a terrible reputation, which they have earned.
Re: The world we live in. (Score:4, Insightful)
I know a few guys who are certain a woman slipped them a Viagra and one that knows since it went horribly wrong and he ended up going to the ER.
Re: The world we live in. (Score:4, Insightful)
It already is.
But non-idiots mitigate risks as best they can - trading off against convenience and so on of course, sometimes with convenience winning by miles.
The message is "never burglarize" and no one thinks advising people to lock their doors somehow changes that message.
The message is "don't abduct children" and no one thinks that "stranger danger" type idiocy in schools changes that message.
Why does any mention of mitigating rape risks always get portrayed as undermining "don't rape".
Re: The world we live in. (Score:4, Insightful)