Drug-assisted rape

Ketamine, 26.14, and GHB, 26.15, have also been associated with drug-assisted rape. Ketamine is primarily a veterinary anesthetic but also has uses in human medicine. GHB is controlled in most jurisdictions but gamma-butyrolactone, from which it can be obtained in vivo or in vitro, is a widely available industrial solvent, and although it has been recently controlled in some countries, it is not yet clear how effective the controls are. 

Today other substances can be used and they are now referred to as date-rape drugs and there is widespread belief that this type of crime is quite common. It isn t. Clinical analysis of the urine or blood of women who claim to have fallen victim to their use, shows that very few have in fact been deliberately drugged. Most have passed out unconscious because they have drunk too much alcohol. In 2005, Michael Scott-Ham and Fiona Burton of the Forensic Science Service, London, reported in the Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine the results of a 3-year study. They analysed 1014 cases of alleged date rape but found that only 21 of the victims (2%) had had their drink deliberately spiked. On this basis, of the 500 such cases reported annually in the UK, only 10 are actual date rapes. In the USA there are more than 250,000 reported rapes per year, but how many of these are drug assisted is not known, although on a comparable basis of 2% it would mean around 5,000. What was discovered in the UK survey was that while alcohol had caused most of the... 

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