Only nine of 168 cases of reported spikings in Scotland were passed on to the Crown Office in the last year.
Exclusive information obtained by STV’s Scotland Tonight shows that despite a steep increase in the number of alleged spikings being reported, in the vast majority of cases, the police do not consider there to be enough evidence to progress.
In 2019-20, a total of 44 reports were made to Police Scotland. By 2021-22, that had risen to 295. However, only 22 of them were sent to the Crown Office.
Spiking is not a specific criminal offence in Scotland. It is instead investigated as drugging – when a person is given drugs without their consent – or as administering a substance for a sexual purpose.
STV NewsThe UK Government has pledged to introduce a new law in England and Wales to treat spiking as a standalone offence, which it says will help police respond to incidents more effectively.
Responding to the statistics, campaigner Colin Mackie said: “There aren’t enough prosecutions and if there are no prosecutions, there’s no deterrent.
“At the moment they are, I think, waiting to find out how the law develops in England and Wales and hopefully when they see it moving forward, they’ll jump on the bandwagon and say ‘we’ve got to be part of this as well’.
The need for change
STV NewsColin and his wife Mandy founded Spike Aware UK in 2017, after the death of their son, Greg. He was 18 when he died following an event at his college.
Mandy said: “We ended up doing a lot of looking into things that are going on, and finding things out ourselves, because nobody was telling us anything. We were just alone.”
Mandy says police didn’t seem to take their concerns that Greg had been spiked seriously until his toxicology results came back.
She said: “It was about two weeks later, when the toxicology reports came back, and they said that it was the equivalent of five ecstasy tablets, and he wasn’t drinking and he literally had a soft drink in his stomach.
“They turned around and said to us, even someone that took drugs would never have taken that amount of drug. And then they sort of tried to start working with us.”
Nobody has ever been arrested in connection with Greg’s death.
STV News‘I genuinely thought I was going to die’
Zoe Smith believes she was spiked in Dunfermline in February 2022.
The then 18-year-old was in a nightclub with friends, when she started to feel unwell.
She said: “I told my friends that I was going to go to the bathroom and that’s when I ended up collapsing on the floor and realised I had been spiked. And I remember that it was at 2am.
“At 4.30am, one of the workers at the nightclub that I was at came banging on the bathroom door, on the cubicle door, and basically pulled me up and dragged me out of the bathroom.”
The following morning Zoe’s mum, who is a nurse, noticed what looked like an injection site on her arm.
STV NewsHowever, when she showed it to the police, Zoe says they didn’t seem equipped to deal with it.
“At first they said, ‘it’s just a spot’. And I was like, ‘it’s not though, because when I woke up, I couldn’t move my arm.’
“I knew my body. But I just felt like the police weren’t listening to what I was saying – it’s like they didn’t take it seriously enough.”
In a statement, superintendent Joanne McEwan from Police Scotland said: “We continue to investigate reports from people having been ‘spiked’ either with a needle or in their drink.
“We are not always able to determine the reasons why a perpetrator carries out an assault in this way, but would like to reassure you that every report is taken seriously and perpetrators are dealt with swiftly and robustly.
“People should be able to go out for a night out without fear of being spiked. We would encourage anyone who believes they have had their drink spiked or been assaulted in this way to contact Police Scotland on 101, or in an emergency 999.”
Minister for Victims and Community Safety Siobhian Brown MSP told Scotland Tonight: “The Scottish Government have been doing a lot of work on this with Police Scotland since 2021… [when] there was a huge spike in reporting. At that stage, we recognised that there was work to be done and that we had to tackle this. Next year, as of April, it will be mandatory for all training for spiking to be done by doormen.”
On the UK government’s plans to introduce a specific criminal offence of spiking, Ms Brown said: “We haven’t seen the detail yet, but of course, we’re totally open to looking at what they bring forward, and if it’s something that we can bring forward to improve things, we’re totally open to it.”
Watch the full report, Scotland Tonight: Spiking in the Spotlight, at 8:30pm on STV and the STV Player.
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