A government minister has revealed that her drink was once spiked on a night out, as she urged for more to be done to tackle the problem.
Mims Davies told BBC Radio Sussex that she has little memory of the incident, which happened in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, in 2019, and that she “had to be carried home”.
“I found something black in the bottom of my drink. I pulled it out and didn’t really think anything of it, and threw it on the floor,” she said.
“It was only later on I thought, ‘Blimey, what was that?’”
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“It was absolutely awful,” she tells BBC Radio Sussex. “I had to be carried home.”
It comes amid growing concern about drink spiking and injection spiking. In September and October there were around 140 confirmed reports of drink spiking, and 24 reports of some form of injection, in which substances are added to drinks without someone’s consent, often with the intention of incapacitating them enough to rob or sexually assault them.
Home secretary Priti Patel has asked the police to investigate the scale of drinks spiking as a number of women have claimed they have been spiked by injection.
Meanwhile, reports of women having their drink spiked in London have increased in the past five years from 136 in the year to September 2017 to 473 in the year to September 2021, the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee heard last month.
Davies, who is the MP for Mid Sussex as well as the employment minister, has written to Patel to ask what more can be done to tackle spiking.
“We should be restricting who on earth can get hold of these products, as we would in any other sphere,” she added in her BBC interview.
“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 carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
In March, the government announced that GHB - often used in drink spiking cases - would be upgraded from a class C to a class B drug after Home Secretary Priti Patel slammed its “truly sickening” use in high-profile rape cases. However, legislation to make that happen has not yet been tabled.
On Wednesday, Home Office minister Rachel Maclean also told the House of Commons drink-spiking was “a horrific and frightening offence” and the government was planning to “ramp up” its response.
