Men desperate for coitus but sans any relationship with women could soon be trembling in their Grasshoppers/ veldskoens/ama-All-Stars.
That’s if an enterprising local manufacturer has its way. The nondescript entrance into the market of a new product could have these so-called ”date rapists” thinking twice before putting their flagitious and diabolical intentions into practice.
A ”Drink Spike Detector Kit” is selling like hot cakes in pharmacies in and around Johannesburg’s notorious suburbs.
”You’d be surprised,” says Heather Murton, a pharmacist at Mays Pharmacy in Melville, when asked how much shelf-time the kits have had.
Murton says she has come across ”the most horrific stories” of women having a drink with a stranger in a bar, only to wake up the next day remembering nothing, except that they had had sex. Mays has been selling the kit for the past two months and, Murton says, it has been selling exceptionally well. Many buyers are single women going out in groups for ”a night out”.
The kit could soon be as essential an item as condoms in any party-loving (yet sensible) woman’s handbag. Its purpose: to identify the presence of ”date rape drugs” in beverages.
Drink Safe Technologies, the manufacturer of the credit card-sized kit, is a partner of a United States-based company that has patented the kit. It contains three cards with two tests each. According to the instructions, the test is ”simple”. The user must place a drop of the beverage on to the spots on each test and then ”smear gently”.
After waiting a few minutes, the user can view the results — if the circle turns blue, it indicates the presence of ”one or more drugs which could be used in drug-facilitated crime”. Drugs like ketamine (or Special K). According to The Martindale, a ”bible” for pharmacists, ketamine, an anaesthetic drug, causes a state of ”psychological dissociation, hallucinations, near death experiences, and severe loss of coordination”.
Among the concentrations of chemicals the test is designed to detect are most sedative-hypnotic drugs, including Rohypnol, which has been popularised as the ”date rape” drug of choice.
”Results are best viewed in a well-lit area,” cautions the test. ”Great care should be taken when you believe that a test is positive,” it says, adding that ”definitive decisions” should not be taken on the basis of a test, and that it should be subject to a more definitive examination by a specialist.
What the test neither cautions against nor advises is broaching the subject with a date. It could have grave consequences for drink-lubricated (but light-hearted) flirts of both sexes in bars everywhere.
And what if a test is wrong, as the kit itself says it could well be? What if the alien substance in the martini wasn’t Rohypnol at all, but drops of the Boksburg-bred gentleman’s aftershave as he leered over you? What about women who may spike their own drinks and then cry rape? Can the test be used as evidence in a court?
”Date rape” is a very real phenomenon. But what does it mean for those who inhabit the real world, who know that one too many drinks can often, through your own fault, land you next to someone you would otherwise not have given the time of day?
It means the test is a killjoy. Nevertheless, it has its uses and necessities. ”There are some sickos out there,” Murton warns.