A minister who claims she was spiked at a bar has called on the Home Secretary to tackle the issue.
Mims Davies, the Conservative MP for Mid Sussex, said she was on a night out in Haywards Heath in 2019 when she noticed a dark substance in her drink.
While she initially dismissed it, she said she later blacked out and had to be carried home to safety. She described it as an “absolutely awful” experience.
“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 told the BBC.
“It was only later on I thought: ‘Blimey, what was that?’ It was absolutely awful. I had to be carried home.”
The employment minister has now written to the Home Secretary to ask what further measures can be taken to prevent spiking.
“We should be restricting who on earth can get hold of these products, as we would in any other sphere,” she said.
“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.”
‘Extremely disturbing’
There have been hundreds of reports of spiking in the UK in recent months, a crime the Home Secretary has described as “horrendous”.
Last month, she asked police chiefs for an urgent update on the scale of the problem and demanded to know what was being done to better protect women.
Rachel Maclean, another MP, told the House of Commons on Wednesday that drink-spiking was a “horrific and frightening offence”.
The Alcohol Education Trust estimates that hundreds of people are victims of drink-spiking each year, where drugs – such as GHB – or alcohol are added without their knowledge.
A spokesman for the Home Office said it is “dedicating local and national resources” to dealing with the “extremely disturbing” crime.
Last weekend, a Pitcher and Piano bar in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, was temporarily closed by police after seven people reported being spiked on the premises in the early hours of Sunday morning.
A Home Office spokesman said: “These reports are extremely disturbing. We are pleased to see that the police are taking this issue seriously and dedicating both local and national resources to investigating it.
“We remain in close contact with the police on this issue and the Home Secretary is receiving regular updates.
“We must now give the police the space to conduct their enquiries, and we would urge anyone with information on these incidents to contact their local force.”
