Date Rape Drugs: The Zombie Sex Toy Narrative
Ok, so the first thing I need to say is that two weeks ago, I started writing the draft of an article about date rape drugs. I was thinking the topic was narrow enough that I could cover in a brief essay that would not take too much time to write. I had recently done a bit of research in Bureau of Justice Statistics, looking for how large the category of rapes-by-drugging was. I looked at statistics regarding rapes and regarding drug offenses, and I could not find this category of crime. For all the warnings to young women, for all the stories in the media, for all the fictional depictions, It must be an extremely rare form of crime.
I have been familiar with the concept of date rape drugs since my youth. As a concept sure to incite unease and fear among sheltered college age women, the date rape drug is highly effective. What starts out as an innocent night out with pals goes suddenly blank – waking with an empty memory the next day. Only later do any fragments of the horrors emerge to give some idea of what happened during your amnesiac nightmare. You find out secondhand about an event in which you were unaware, unable to form memories, completely pliant and posable, and used as an accessory for someone else’s sexual pleasure.
The dividing line between ordinary evening and waking up as a victim oblivious to the previous night of obscene violation is a bit of liquid or powder slid into your drink by the hand of a stranger. This powerful concoction must incapacitate the victim too quickly for her to notice distressing effects and alert her companions. Once he administers this powerful chemical, he’s ready to slip her out the door unnoticed by her friends or any bystanders who might question a man swiftly propelling an unresponsive woman out of the establishment.
When he gets her to a private place, he can indulge in his specific preferred sexual enjoyments for many hours. She will eventually awaken with no awareness of any of the creepy things he has done, and she will be nowhere near him when she finally has enough memory fragments for the full horror to finally dawn on her.
Of course, a lot of things have to go his way for this nefarious stranger to indulge in this particular sexual scenario. She and her friends don’t depart the venue together before the drug takes effect. She doesn’t become unconscious or noticeably unsteady on her feet before he has a chance to remove her from the public place where he targeted her. She doesn’t wander away and wind up unconscious in a ladies’ room stall, inaccessible to him. Her boyfriend doesn’t show up to meet her for a planned date. The dose is high enough to blot out her memory for a long enough time for the stranger to enact his plans, but not high enough to actually lead to a coma or death. And she isn’t wearing that color-changing nail polish.
He would have to know how to identify which woman in a public place can be spirited off for many hours without anyone missing her and raising the alarm. He would want a woman who hasn’t consumed prescribed medication or a recreational drug that could interact with the chemical he uses. He has to deploy the drug unnoticed among strangers in public. He has to get her into a secure location, and later either offer her an explanation for how she finds herself that she will find satisfying, or he must get her away from that place and himself so she has less of a chance of remembering enough for the police to be able to identify him as a suspect.
Setting aside radical feminist claims about misogyny being rampant in our society, the kind of man who would engineer for himself a sex life of one night stands, each sexual partner being completely inert – not only unresponsive to stimulation, but unable to initiate stimulation of him – and who has perfected his techniques for drugging and abducting a woman while in a bar or party full of people – would be a rare kind of guy.
In fact, he is more rare than that. This particular profile seems to be the product of fearful imagination.
When I thought of doing a short essay on the narratives and facts regarding drugs that are identified in the public imagination as “date rape drugs”, I recalled the name of a man convicted of drugged rapes, Andrew Luster. My recollection was that he didn’t go to public places to slip drugs into a stranger’s drink and spirit the victim away. As I remembered the story, he would invite women to his house, where the drugs were administered and the women were raped while in a state of complete unawareness.
Researching Luster’s case, I happened upon mentions of three more cases: John Gordon Jones, who was acquitted of being the “limousine rapist”; Stefan and George Spitzer, the Roofie Romeos, twins convicted of using their dad’s prescribed back medication to rape women, and the Ken and Barbie killers, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. None of these cases, from Luster on, were congruent with the accepted date rape drug narrative. Of all the above, the Homolka/Bernardo crimes were least similar to the date rape drug scenario. Homolka and Bernardo are so dissimilar to the narrative, that their story isn’t appropriate for a discussion of date rape drugs.
The other name that came to mind was Bill Cosby, whose recent conviction is not the end of the charges he faces for incidents that mostly occurred decades ago. A few months ago, I watched some You Tube videos about his case, the accusers, and and other people who knew him in the relevant time. I was surprised by the guilty verdict in his first trial.
The Max Factor $55,000/year Heir
I researched on Andrew Luster’s case, to avoid inaccuracy about details. Among old newspaper articles and crime blogs, were the Andrew Luster Truth Page and the Andrew Luster Justice Forum. Each appears to be a labor of love, as opposed to a slick, professional production. Neither the web site nor the forum has information more recent that his re-sentencing a couple of years ago, but someone is keeping them on the internet. Examining the blog and forum first, I realized that what I initially called to mind about the case were pretty much informed by the made-for-TV-movie, “A Date with Darkness: The Trial and Capture of Andrew Luster.” So I read the blog, bits of the forum (which appears to be remnants of a more extensive previous blog), some news reports and the NYT review of the movie.
The movie Andrew Luster is a deviant mansion-dwelling playboy millionaire, one of whose victims (a former girlfriend who lived with him for some months) is depicted as only ever necking with Andrew and unaware she’d ever had sex with Andrew until shown the tape by police. According to the NYT review, “If this comes off as ritualized revenge, it seems richly deserved.”
The thing about rituals, though, is they’re about beliefs and emotions, not facts or accuracy.
Three women testified under pseudonyms they were victims: Carey Doe, the one who complained to police that she believed she’d been raped while drugged; Tonja Doe, an ex girlfriend who lived with Luster after the night in question, who came forward years later after seeing newspaper stories about the allegations; and Shawna Doe, an ex girlfriend who saw her own tattoo in a photo sheriffs circulated to seek more victims. I can imagine that realizing the police were broadcasting a photo of one of your identifying features requesting contact would be impressive – and terrifying – to experience.
The first news story on the forum, from Pasadena Star News in 2003 reported, “Max Factor heir Andrew Luster used a date-rape drug to lure his victims into a sense of security and euphoria before raping three unconscious women and videotaping several of the encounters, a prosecutor told the jury Monday.”
Security? Euphoria? That’s not part of the narrative. The woman is supposed to be completely unaware, unable to move or speak, but pliable so she can be used – in the phrase of a crime blog entry about Spitzer Twins I will discuss in more detail below – “a Zombie Sex Toy”.
Clearly A Zombie Sex Toy doesn’t need to feel security or euphoria – or anything. Security and euphoria are what one would hope a willing partner would feel in an intimate encounter.
Another article on the forum covered Tonja’s testimony. She and her sister met Luster during a night of bar-hopping that ended at Luster’s modest home, where he offered her GHB (not yet illegal at the time). According to her testimony, the following morning, “There were no bruises, no pain.” She lived with him as his girlfriend for six months after the night in question.
Tonja wept describing seeing herself in a tape, limp, seemingly unconscious and being held in sexual positions by Luster (in clothes she says she wore the first night she slept at his house). She testified, “I detest him. I hate him. I can’t believe he’d ever do this to me.”
“I can’t believe he would ever do this to me.”
“There were no bruises, no pain.”
Euphoria.
Security.
Hold those thoughts.
Carrie was the only woman to come forward to police to complain about Andrew. She and two male guests spent the night at Andrew’s house after bar-hopping. Several days after her one and only overnight visit to his house, and after discussion with friends, she reported her suspicion that a man had drugged into unconsciousness and amnesia, after which he raped her.
Police immediately recruited her to participate in a recorded phone call to elicit incriminating statements from Andrew. She asked what he put in her drink, and he replied, “Liquid X.” This was used as the basis for a search warrant that netted 17 video tapes of Andrew having sex with women.
Police testing showed three men’s semen on the dress Carey had worn at Luster’s house, and no GHB in her system.
One other thing about Carrie’s encounter with Andrew – the morning she woke at his house and had sex with him, she gave Andrew her phone number. Could his not calling her have soured her feelings about the sex she’d had with Andrew before she accepted his offer of GHB, and the sex they’d had the following morning?
The day his trial resumed after Christmas break, Andrew Luster fled to Mexico. His trial continued while he was in absentia. He was captured. The defense portrayed fleeing as an act of desperation. During her closing argument the prosecutor said, “Guilty people run.”
Andrew Luster was convicted of 86 of 87 counts, sentenced to 124 years in prison (reduced to 25 years in 2013) based on the events of three nights.
Prosecutors claimed that he assaulted “many others” who hadn’t been identified. So why pile 88 charges onto the events of three nights? Why three witnesses instead of a dozen?
A crime web site post, written some time after Andrew’s sentence was reduced, includes remarks from Dr. Judy Kuriansky, a clinical psychologist and certified sex therapist who never met or treated Andrew, but says she followed his case. She describes somnophilia or Sleeping Beauty Syndrome as a form of dominant/submissive relationship that is “infantile and hostile and shows inability to respect women.” She says “In Luster’s case, the ‘partners’ appeared to have no choice. She also listed somnophilia characteristics that she believed Luster to have: need to control women, low self-esteem/fear rejection by women, spoiled and accustomed to getting what he wants from women, perhaps parental dynamics, perhaps being intrigued by his late psychiatrist father’s use of drugs to alter patients’ behavior.
If he’s used to getting what he wants, why would he have fear of rejection by women? Why low self-esteem? Why develop an elaborate, dangerous and potentially illegal drugging method to get what he wants, if he already gets what he wants?
His father died when Andrew was nine. How much would a nine-year-old know about his father’s prescribing of drugs or their effects on patients?
Why would a sex therapist and expert on love be the right expert to provide accurate information about sex criminals? Would a sex therapist’s expertise be focused on couples in relationships? Would not an expert on criminals shed more light on the attitudes and behaviors of a sex criminal?
If, as Dr. Kuriansky states, somnophilia is a sub-category of Dominance/Submission, which is a sub-category of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism), why would it involve inflicting this kink on oblivious strangers? Even the most cursory internet search shows that BDSM – and the sub-category, Dominance/Submission – a form of playacting in which the two parties have different but compatible roles, and are equal participants in designing the parameters of the interaction. The desires and comforts of one partner do not over-ride those of the other. It is from the BDSM community that the world of normies have acquired such concepts as boundaries, consent, and safe word.
Communication, negotiation and shared enjoyment are elements of the BDSM world that are entirely incompatible with the scenario of drugging, positioning and raping an unaware stranger. If somnophilia were consistent with other subcategories of BDSM, such as Dominant/Submissive, it would be all about a man whose dream of making love to a flesh-and-blood manikin would seek a woman whose dream is to be ravished while in the depths of unconsciousness, the exact same way that a sadist would seek out a masochist and vice versa. Perhaps the partner who is awake during the encounter would record the events, so the sleeping partner could enjoy watching later.
Another important fact is that those who enjoy BDSM, like people interested in swinging or polyamory, frequently form and/or find communities and forums of their own, to meet potentially compatible partners, share etiquette and techniques, and for more general socializing. The more I read about BDSM, the less appropriate it appears to include somnophilia as Dr. Kuriansky describes it as a subset of BDSM. The date rape drug scenario is even more incongruent with BDSM.
Then I thought perhaps sex dolls and/or robots might be a closer parallel to unconscious but pliable state a somnophiliac would prefer in a partner. A sex doll or bot could easily be used, or programmed for use, by a man whose turn-on is a woman who is unconscious, un-responsive and posable.
But the trends in sex doll/sex bot technology and marketing reveals an industry that is producing products that are becoming less like the unresponsive date rape drug narrative’s victim.
Real Doll, which has been selling sex dolls for 20 years, now sells an AI-capable head that can be attached to an existing Real Doll. There are sex bots on the market that can speak and form various facial expressions, have body parts that are warm and heartbeats that get faster as action progresses.
If the date-rape-drug rapist is a man who wishes to turn a living, responsive woman into an inert, posable object, men who acquire sex dolls, tend to attribute to those dolls characteristics and feelings of a relationship that extend far beyond satisfying strictly physical needs. A widower described his custom made doll as not only not a sex object, but as an object of affection, “a companion, even.” One documentary I saw featured men who would dress their dolls up and take them on outings. One guy who was considering an AI head for his Real Doll vacillated because he was fond of the face she had, didn’t want the new head to be noticably different.
A company that makes AI that animates sex bots also makes a virtual girlfriend app that will form a relationship with its owner via conversation and/or texting on a phone or tablet. An author given the chance to create an AI girlfriend discovered, as he was choosing attributes for the AI girlfriend’s on-screen avatar, that he had begun to wonder what options “Jackie” would prefer. A Real Doll, or an AI avatar, may be categorized a sex toy, but their owners don’t seem to view them as zombies.
A man who wants to get away with raping a woman who is not only unresponsive, but is and will ideally remain, unaware of what he’s done to her may not be the type of guy who would be attracted to a sex doll or girlfriend avatar. Maybe the men who more closely match the profile of a somnophiliac might be a category of rapists. The common element would be the lack of cooperation in the object of sexual demands.
So here’s what the Office of Justice Programs website has to say on their website about the criminal proclivities of rapists. “Rapists have been shown to resemble violent offenders or criminals in general. Similar to violent offenders, Simon (2000) found that rapists displayed significant diversity in their offense records in comparison to child sexual abusers and had committed equivalent proportions of drug-related offenses, thefts, and burglaries. Harris, Mazerolle, and Knight (2009) suggest that rape can be explained by the general theory of crime. Rapists are versatile criminals who engage in many different types of crime over time; sexual offending reflects only one manifestation of an underlying antisocial condition (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990).” Also, criminals slow down in the number of crimes they commit as they get older.
“Harris, Mazerolle, and Knight (2009) examined 374 male sexual offenders to compare these models of sexual offending. The researchers found that the majority of sexual offenders followed the generalist model. Rapists and child sexual abusers exhibited extensive criminal histories, substance abuse issues, antisocial tendencies, and psychosis. In addition, few rapists specialized in sexual crimes. Those who did specialize in sexual crimes were more likely to exhibit characteristics similar to child sexual abusers, such as sexual deviance and sexual preoccupation. As Lussier, Proulx, and LeBlanc (2005) found, the specialist model was evident in child sexual abusers. Child sexual abusers assessed as specialists were more likely than nonspecialists to know the victim, exhibit sexual preoccupation, and display emotional congruence with children.”
According to the FBI, most crimes are committed by young offenders, with the peak age for criminals being 25 years old. Andrew Luster, the Spitzer twins and John Gordon Jones were all over the age of 40, with no criminal convictions, at the time they were prosecuted for sexual assaults said to be facilitated by drugs.
The Roofie Romeos
Twins George “Gino” and Stefan “Julian” Spitzer were Romanian immigrants, 40 years old at the time of their 1998 trial. George was charged with kidnap, sodomy and rape, Stefan with rape, sodomy, penetration with foreign object and sexual battery during 1992 and 1993. Though the prosecutor said at trial they’d started as early as 1982, the prosecutor’s claim is the only trace of evidence I could find for this. Neither brother was convicted – or charged with – poisoning, drugging, adulterating food. Not even in the cases for which they stood trial.
The Spitzer twins’ troubles started when Kimberly had had a disappointing date with George. She said she had one glass of wine and a plan to head home by 11 pm, but says she woke at 5:45 disoriented. Running into George later that day, she asked if they’ had sex, and he said no.
That day, Kimberly went to the police and they ordered testing that showed semen in her body.
George’s house was searched and seven boxes of rohypnol discovered. Two things: Not one alleged victim of George or Stefan tested positive for this particular benzodiazepine. None of the women were on video appearing drugged.
The Spitzers’ father was prescribed rohypnol for back pain. Prior to March 1996, it was legal for an individual to import up to a 3 month supply with a prescription. It’s possible their father had hoarded rohypnol in anticipation that it would soon be unavailable to him.
A crime blog article about the twins said, “One thing is certain, the drug was tailor made for bottom feeders like the Spitzers. They could slip the undetectable drug into a woman’s drink and turn her into a zombie sex toy with little or no memory.”
But is Rohypnol – or GHB – really tailor-made for turning a woman into a vacuous and compliant object for sexual gratification?
Drugs and Memory Loss
The first thing to understand when considering the potential for either of these drugs to be used to exert secret control on an adult human is whether human brains can be acted upon by these drugs in such a way as to make possible the kind of unawareness, memory deficits and bodily state described in the date rape drug narratives.
The medical term for loss of memory is Amnesia. Unlike the exciting Hollywood version, real life amnesia is not like a section of videotape that is wiped of any sound or images. Memory loss tends to be patchy, and sometimes talking with other people can help with recollection. If amnesia is induced by too much of a chemical, such as alcohol, memory problems will often resolve once the drug is out of the body. Memories can also return spontaneously over time. Return of memories is often gradual and unpredictable.
Amnesia as severe as the date rape narrative requires could be an indication of an emergency, such as a stroke, head trauma, inflammation, infection, or lack of oxygen from heart attack or carbon monoxide. Amnesia requires medical evaluation, preferably by a neurologist, including checking reflexes, sensory function, balance, judgment, short term and long term memory MRI, CT or EEG, and blood work for infection or nutritional status, and cognitive tests. The doctor needs to know when the memory loss started, the trigger (e.g., head injury), family history, recent drug/alcohol use, and observe for problems like confusion, language difficulty, personality changes, difficulty with self care, seizures, depression, headaches.
Another little-known fact about amnesia: not only is it rare, but the severe, empty-videotape kind of amnesia is rarer, still.
An even less-known fact about amnesia is that the person who has the amnesia doesn’t know she has amnesia. The person must be informed about the amnesia.
The next question is whether amnesia can be caused by either rohypnol (a benzodiazepine) or GHB (4-hydroxybutrate, a substance that occurs naturally in the body, and at high doses is reported to have effects on the brain, behavior & memory). Each is widely reported to cause memory defects alone, or in combination with alcohol or another drug. But whether benzodiazepines or GHB cause defects in memory has not been well studied as we will see below.
Rohypnol is a benzodiazepine sedative used to treat sleep problems, anxiety, panic, seizure disorders, alcohol withdrawal, as an adjunct to anesthesia and a muscle relaxant. The most prescribed sedative in Europe, it has never been legally sold or prescribed in the US, and even importing it with a prescription became illegal in 1996. Rohypnol takes effect within 15-20 minutes after administration, peaks after 2 hours, and residual effects are reported to last between 6 to 12 hours. It is detectable in urine for up to 72 hours.
A 2016 study collected 41 Swiss users’ reports of the effects of benzodiazepines alone and in combination with alcohol and/or other drugs on their behavior and memory. The paper’s abstract mentions suspicions of rohypnol triggering violent criminal behavior and severe memory disturbances, “However, data from investigations of this relationship are scarce and have been primarily derived from forensic institutions, where there may be a reporting bias.”
Of the 41 subjects, 25 reported anterograde amnesia, the inability to form memories for events after the trigger of the amnesia. Participants admitted to disinhibited behavior – shoplifting, petty crimes, sex with strangers, cheating on a partner, violence, crimes, and aggressive behavior leading to injury. Subjects noted negative consequences on personal relationships, and that behaviors under the influence of benzodiazepines, when described to them by others, were not compatible with their self-conception or normal behavior. Distress, shame and embarrassment were reported to researchers.
But the most important thing in the paper, was at the end, “We were unable to verify objectively either the occurrence of anterograde amnesia or the combination and amount of ingested substances that might have contributed to it, limiting the generalizability of the study.”
By the way, in 1996 the manufacturer of rohypnol reformulated the pills so that if one tries to dissolve them in water, a blue color appears.
Like benzodiazepines, the connection between GHB and memory deficits has been little studied. Unlike benzodiazepines, GHB occurs naturally in small amounts, found in all bodily tissues, with the highest concentrations in the brain. According to an abstract on Sciencedirect.com, “GHB is a GHB/GABA-B receptor agonist that induces a paradoxical state of mixed stimulation and sedation at moderate doses, which makes it a valuable tool to investigate neural signatures of subjective drug effects.” Also, “GHB generates a unique stimulant/sedative subjective state that is paralleled by a complex pattern of increased functional connectivity encompassing all three core neuro-cognitive networks of the brain….” A drug that can induce a state that includes stimulation – even if it is with sedation – seems an unlikely tool for instilling a state of unconsciousness, unawareness and memory deficit.
A second Sciencedirect.com abstract described a placebo controlled experiment to test the pro-sexual effects of GHB, which included subjective reports of sexual arousal, and measured increased activation of the bilateral NAcc and right anterior cingulate cortex, and increased connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and NAcc. “Our data show that GHB stimulates hedonic sexual functioning and lowers the threshold for erotic perception, which is related to increased susceptibility of mesolimbic reward pathways.”
Neither of the abstracts mention unconsciousness, unawareness or amnesia. From these abstracts, it seems GHB might be useful to someone who wants to enjoy sexual stimuli, but not useful to transform another person into a Zombie Sex Toy.
Nevertheless, in 2000, GHB alone were made a Schedule 1 controlled substance, in the same category as heroin (legal until 1914), LSD (legal until 1966), marijuana (legal until 1933), quaaludes (legal until 1984) and so on. Happily for narcoleptics, starting in 2005, the prescription sleep medication Xyrem, containing GHB, was put on Schedule 3.
There is one other element of amnesia that we must now explore. People who suffer amnesia will fill the lost time with manufactured memories, a process called confabulation. While not intentionally lying, since the individual is unaware of the defects of memory, the individual will report events that did not occur or jumbled bits of true memories that are inaccurately retrieved or interpreted. According to the Psychiatry Times, confabulation is more a problem of retrieval than encoding, ranging from inaccurate or distorted recollection of past events to entirely fictitious narratives. Confabulations can be spontaneous, or can be provoked. Spontaneous confabulations can be traced to actual events. Over time, confabulations tend to recede, even if the memory deficit persists. As the person becomes more aware of having confabulated, the person will confabulate less.
One other thing about confabulations, like amnesia itself, confabulation tends to be associated with serious problems, like traumatic brain injury, aneurysm, hemorrhage, brain tumors or rupture of a blood vessel.
The Millionaire Limousine Rapist
John Gordon Jones was the next man tried for drugged rape that I researched. Jones was tried in 2001, the year before Luster, in an adjacent California county. In fact, at least one defense attorney and one defense investigator worked on both cases.
After the police were contacted by one woman who claimed to have been drugged and raped, the police made an announcement requesting potential victims to come forward.
The woman who made the complaint to police tested positive for cocaine.
Jurors said a trip to Jones’ house was key, as they noticed no locks on the doors of rooms that women claimed they’d been locked in.
After his acquittal, Jones said that the DA’s office had falsified and hidden documents, and that, “Well, what happened is the District Attorney’s Office wanted to have a GHB date rape case, and they wanted to go ahead and prosecute me no matter what the truth was.”
They Wanted a Date Rape Case
According to the Deranged Crimes website’s essay about the Spitzer twins, “News coverage on roofies continued sporadically until 1996 when it exploded. The potential for the drug to be used in date rape was a hot topic for women’s magazines and magazines geared toward teenage girls. Oprah Winfrey was one of many TV talk show hosts who covered the dangers of date rape drugs. Discussion of the the drugs wasn’t confined to talk shows; scripted shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and South Park also weighed in. Women were warned never to leave a drink unattended and to avoid punch bowls at parties.”
A nice, juicy trial convicting a man of being a date rape drug assailant would make for headlines, and opportunities for law enforcement officers or forensic researchers to get to be on TV.
The year 1996 was not just the year that date rape drugs were being covered by many publications and programs geared toward young female audiences. It was also the year that the Drug-Induced Rape Prevention and Punishment Act was passed. Like the Mann Act of 1910, this federal legislation was enacted in response to reports of a certain specific new type of crime. In 1996, it was rape using a drug as a restraining device, and in 1910, transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes. While there have been a small number of prosecutions under the Mann Act, it has not led to a single prosecution involving an organized multi-state prostitution crime ring of the sort the law was supposed to target. It has mostly been used to punish adulterers who take their lovers on naughty weekends that include crossing state lines. Like massage therapy or nursing or consulting, prostitution is a service performed by an individual paid by the hour, a business model that is not “scaleable” to the type of interstate enterprise that the writers of the Mann Act portrayed to the public.
What about reports of Failed Date Rape Drug Attempts?
Where are the news stories of women who have a drug slipped into a drink but don’t become the unconscious, pliable, memory-deficient target, who become aggressive or suffer known side effects such as vomiting or diarrhea? Where are the news stories of women whose color-changing nail polish alerted them to a date-rape-drug in their drinks, whether or not it lead to the arrest of a particular man? Something like, “Ladies, watch your drinks! A woman in the XYZ Club found evidence of a drug in her drink last Friday night,” or a social media post showing a photo of the nail polish color change. I found one case, but as of this writing it hasn’t gone to trial yet.
A study published in 1999 was initiated to collect evidence of the prevalence of rohypnol (flunitrazepam) use to facilitate rape. Over 24 months during 1996-1998, 1033 urine samples were submitted from U.S. emergency rooms, rape crisis centers or law enforcement agencies in connection to allegations of sexual assault involving misuse of a drug, slightly less than one urine sample per state per month. The most common result was found in 422 of the samples. That result was absolutely no drug at all. The second most common result was positive for alcohol, 382 positive results (some samples positive for alcohol were positive for other drugs as well). GHB, sold over-the-counter at the time of this study, was detected in 45 samples. Rohypnol was in 6 samples, but 4 of the samples positive for rohypnol were positive for other drugs as well. (Rohypnol, never approved for US sale was banned for import during the first year of this study).
The authors concluded, “These data clearly indicate that there is no evidence of widespread misuse of flunitrazepam in sexual assault. Alcohol remains the substance most frequently associated with this type of crime.” According to these researchers, “Despite the widespread media interest, there has been little proven evidence and no systematic investigation of the incidence of drug use in the crime of sexual assault.”
So here’s what I think is an entirely plausible explanation for women to develop a belief they were assaulted and drugged, like the women who had such profound effects on the lives of Andrew Luster, John Gordon Jones and the Spitzer twins. Suppose a woman voluntarily consumes alcohol and/or a drug and voluntarily engages in sex, but wakes in the morning with fuzzy memories of partying at a bar, sex in a location she’d never visited before and feeling fearful or aggressive or out-of-sorts. Suppose he didn’t call her after a couple of days, or he was a pompous, self-focused, boring date, or she doesn’t remember what she saw in the guy. Perhaps she discusses her feelings and what she recalls of the events of the night in question with friends who encourage her to feel like a victim and contact police (or in more recent years, campus authorities). After this, the police engage in a strategy to find more victims – searching the home of the man in question for evidence involving drugs, video recordings of sex with the complaining witness or other women, approaching women from his past, or using the media to request women come forward.
My first question is, if a person walks into a police station and announces, “I’m suffering amnesia,” why do the police not immediately have this person taken to the hospital for a neurological examination? Amnesia, when it does occur, is the result of a serious problem of the brain, and if recently discovered, a potential medical emergency.
My next question would be, why would police believe that this person who claims to have a defective memory to be an accurate source of information on how this amnesia came to be? Missing memory would interfere with accuracy in reporting about the time period in question, as well as possibly leading to inaccurate reporting of events prior to the incident that triggered the amnesia. In addition, amnesia-caused confabulation means that the events reported by an amnesiac can be entirely – or partially – untrue, or could be a conglomeration of partial memories reconfigured in an inaccurate way. Any of these could occur without the amnesiac individual intending to tell falsehoods.
It would seem to me that there would have to be a lot of investigating by both police and medical personnel, to determine what, if any, portions of the story are true, partly true or the product of a serious brain injury or disease. Not to mention if the woman has suffered a disease, injury or brain event, speedy medical treatment should be a priority higher than the hunt for the elusive – and potentially fabricated – date rape drug somnophiliacs.
The fact that, in the cases described above, the police were willing to assume the truth of the women’s stories of having been drugged to insensibility and sexually assaulted, initiating an investigation that included testing the women for the presence of semen and drugs, but didn’t take the reported amnesia seriously enough to have the women promptly examined by neurologists, is disturbing. First, it suggests that the police officers in question had no understanding of the seriousness of the insult to the brain required to generate the type of blank memory consistent with the date-rape-drug narrative, as the narrative conflates unconsciousness with amnesia and with being as pliable as a doll, and with the victim completely lacking any agency involving the events in question.
Another possibility is that the selective way in which police took seriously the claim of rape but not the medical implications of severe amnesia, is consistent with the claims of the attorneys who represented Andrew Luster and John Gordon Jones that the police were interested in giving the media a “good” date rape drug story. Good meaning an actual conviction of a man that could be discussed on Oprah and in women’s magazines.
Let’s take a moment to remember these things, that were said at Andrew Luster’s trial:
“I can’t believe he would ever do this to me.”
“There were no bruises, no pain.”
Euphoria.
Security.
The euphoria and security were what the prosecutor thought the effects of Liquid X would be on the women that slept with Andrew. He didn’t leave these women bruised or in pain. One of the accusers said on the stand, “I can’t believe he would ever do this to me.” Maybe because he didn’t do it. Perhaps Andrew’s trial and conviction were the product of faulty memories and faulty beliefs about the workings of the human mind and human sexual desires.
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Sources
Andrew Luster
The Andrew Luster Justice Forum
http://stg.proboards.com
webpage
http://www.andrewluster.net/home.html
article preserved by wayback machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20150210000550/http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/sexual_assault/andrew_luster/1.html
Zombie sex toy mentioned here:
http://derangedlacrimes.com/?tag=rohypnol
Movie Review
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Dominance/Submission described by participating couple
start at minute 44:20 they compare 50 Shades & The Secretary (inaccurate, v accurate D/S relationships in film) June even says you can’t get someone to like this stuff if he doesn’t
BDSM rules explained
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-common-rules-for-BDSM
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Sex Bots & Sex Dolls
sex bots as companions
https://www.cnet.com/news/abyss-creations-ai-sex-robots-headed-to-your-bed-and-heart/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/09/married-to-a-doll-why-one-man-advocates-synthetic-love/279361/
sex bots available now
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Rapists’ criminal characteristics
Office Of Justice Programs
https://smart.gov/SOMAPI/sec1/ch3_typology.html
Less crimes with age
https://www.encyclopedia.com/law/legal-and-political-magazines/age-and-crime
Michael R. Gottfriedson and Travis Hirschi, “A General Theory of Crime” Stanford University Press 1990.
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Spitzer Twins
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/jun/18/local/me-61130
http://derangedlacrimes.com/?tag=rohypnol
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Rohypnol, GHB, Amnesia
amnesia overview
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/9673.php
http://tbivoices.com/img/Jeremiah’s%20Story.pdf
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/amnesia/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20353366
https://www.healthline.com/health/amnesia#causes
amnesiacs unaware of amnesia
benzo & amnesia
http://neurologiauruguay.org/home/images/publicacion/benzodiazepines%20and%20memory.pdf
rohypnol
https://www.drugs.com/illicit/rohypnol.htmlrohypnol – flunitrazepam
https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Rohipnol
https://www.thoughtco.com/rohypnol-or-roofies-fast-facts-606394
import banned since 1996
http://ndsn.org/APRIL96/ROHYPNOL.html
benzodiazepines
https://www.drugs.com/article/benzodiazepines.html
2016 study of benzodiazepines and amnesia
http://jaapl.org/content/44/3/328
benzos popularity
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/12/medicare-tranquilizers_n_7567032.html
benzo epidemic 2011 – https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-the-fda-is-sleeping-through-the-xanax-epidemic/
rohypnol/benzo not great date rape drug
https://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileychi/psychiatry/92_ftp.pdf
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GHB
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811918302064
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924977X17301773
https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/gamma-hydroxybutyrate
how ghb became illegal
https://www.antiaging-systems.com/articles/152-the-classification-of-ghb-in-the-usa
GHB mass hysteria
http://disinfo.com/2013/01/ghb-prohibition-codification-of-moral-mass-hysteria/
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John Gordon Jones
http://www.huliq.com/32649/millionaire-cleared-in-rape-case-calls-experience-devastating
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jul/06/local/me-jones6
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Confabulation
http://memorylossonline.com/pastissues/summer2000/confabulation.html
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/cognitive-disorders/confabulation-bridge-between-neurology-and-psychiatry
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/9673.php
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/amnesia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353360
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A good GHB story for the media
Drug-Induced Rape Prevention and Punishment Act of 1996
Signed Oct 13, 1996
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/104/hr4137
roofie romeos essay/GHB in media
http://derangedlacrimes.com/?tag=rohypnol
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Reports of women going to police or ER claiming someone tried to drug me but I didn’t lose memory
https://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileychi/psychiatry/92_ftp.pdf
failed roofie attempt (trial hasn’t occurred yet)
https://anonhq.com/charlies-angels-3-badass-women-stop-date-rape-california-restaurant/
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