For several months in late 2021, a panic swept through the United Kingdom after dozens of people reported having been attacked by needle-wielding criminals in bars and nightclubs.
As Adela Suliman of The Washington Post reported on October 23:
There have been multiple reports of “needle spiking”—which involves an injection being administered to someone without their knowledge or consent, usually in a nightclub or bar setting. … Zara Owen, a 19-year-old student in Nottingham, central England, said she woke up after clubbing with a “sharp, agonizing pain in my leg” and “almost zero recollection” of the night before. She walked with a limp for the remainder of the day, she wrote on social media, before finding a “pinprick” and realizing that she had been “spiked” by a needle that had pierced through her jeans.
Police in Nottinghamshire reported fifteen such mysterious incidents in the first three weeks of October, sharing common themes: most of the victims were college-age women, and the incidents happened at nightclubs usually in college towns such as Dublin, Exeter, Glasgow, and Birmingham. British tabloids rushed to splash lurid headlines warning the public of the terrifying new threat. The fear was echoed, if in slightly less sensational terms, by mainstream press such as The New York Times, which framed the needle attacks as “a new kind of assault” in an October 22 article.
Many people took to social media to warn others about the danger. This is part of a widespread pattern; in recent years, TikTok and Twitter have hosted many viral videos spreading rumors about dangers and threats—particularly targeted at women and children—including assaults, abductions, and school shootings (see, for example, “Social Media Abduction Rumors Go Viral” in the July/August 2021 Skeptical Inquirer, “TikTok Shooting Panic Hoax Goes Viral” at skepticalinquirer.org; and “Zip Tie Abduction Rumors Spread, Lead to Panic and Arrests” in the November/December 2020 SI).
As news and social media swarmed with scary stories, police investigated. Nottinghamshire police said that no other offenses, including sexual assault, were linked to the reports of being injected. Universities across the country condemned the attacks and called for better safety measures, often adding that they had received no reports of it happening on their campuses. Nightclubs also encouraged patrons to be aware of their surroundings and immediately report any suspicious behavior. Marches, boycotts, and protests were organized by public safety advocates demanding the needle jabbers be stopped. Outrage over the needle attacks prompted a public petition demanding that laws be passed to thoroughly search guests who arrive in nightclubs.
Many young women reported feeling unsafe and anxious due to the reports; some said they wore thicker clothing to ward off needles in addition to increasing their vigilance. A profile of the alleged attackers never emerged, though they were widely assumed to be men. Many noted with exasperation the sexist unfairness of victims, mostly women, feeling they have to take such steps to be safe when the real threat was whoever was injecting people with needles. In most of the news and social media reports, the needle spiking concerns were explicitly linked to, and seen as part of, the larger (and widely recognized) problem of drink spiking, in which sedatives are surreptitiously introduced into a person’s drink in a bar or club setting, facilitating assault. The incidents were both mysterious and frightening. But who was doing it and why? What drugs were being used? And more important, why was no one being caught or arrested despite increasing numbers of reports?
A Closer Look
While social media universally hyped the story, some journalists took a more measured approach. An October 22 BBC News article was one of the earliest and highest-profile pieces to cast the claims in a skeptical light. Titled “Injection Spiking: How Likely Is It?,” the article approached the topic from a medical and logistical point of view. Professor Adam Winstock from the Global Drugs Survey was doubtful that injections were taking place as described:
Needles have to be inserted with a level of care—and that’s when you’ve got the patient sitting in front of you with skin and no clothes … The idea these things can be randomly given through clothes in a club is just not that likely. Normally you’d have to inject several millilitres—that’s half a teaspoon full of drug—into somebody. That hurts, and people notice.
The New York Times article quoted Fiona Measham, professor and chair of criminology at the University of Liverpool, describing the attacks as “not impossible but really unlikely.” Experts agreed on two things: that drink spiking is an unrelated but real problem and that it was not impossible that a few needle attacks had happened—just very unlikely given the nature of the attack and circumstances.
From a toxicology point of view, any drug capable of the effects attributed to the attacks (fainting, loss of control, blackouts, etc.) would need to be administered in large enough quantities to be effective and therefore would be detectable in subsequent blood tests. Yet in all the many dozens of reports, not a single one was confirmed by blood analysis. Despite the combined efforts of several police agencies across the United Kingdom, not one suspected victim of needle spiking had unknown substances in her or his blood. There was, as might be expected among the clubgoing demographic, evidence of other psychotropic drugs, including alcohol, ketamine, LSD, ecstasy, cannabinoids, and methamphetamines. These drugs—either alone or in combination—can induce the symptoms reported in the needle attacks, but no unintentionally ingested drugs were found.
Professor Chris French of Goldsmiths College at the University of London was one of the first prominent skeptics to weigh in on the subject in a December 8 article for The Skeptic (U.K.) website, noting:
The reports of feeling a sharp pain are more likely to be due to, say, insect bites or other mundane causes than to surreptitious injection. There are equally mundane explanations for the discovery of marks on the body, such as bruising. When we have no reason to examine our bodies for evidence of anything out of the ordinary, we fail to notice everyday bumps, bruises, and grazes; when we have motivation to look, we are less likely to overlook such mundane marks. This is a phenomenon we see among groups like those who claim to have been abducted by aliens, where any mark of unknown origin that they find on their bodies is taken as evidence of the medical intervention by extraterrestrials they were already primed to believe occurred.
The needle-spiking panic soon faded as quickly as it came, and though reports dropped quickly, the police continued to investigate. There were few leads to go on, and the lack of motive was yet another confounder. Why would one or more people go to the difficulty and effort of surreptitiously drugging strangers with needles in clubs? There seemed to be no benefit—and, given the increased police presence, severe consequences—to the act.
Panic and Reports Spread
As reported attacks waned in the United Kingdom, they began to appear in the United States. One of the first appeared in connection to an entertainment tragedy. The New York Post tabloid reported, “A needle wielding assailant suspected of injecting at least one person with a possible opioid may have sparked the panic that killed at least eight people and injured 300 others during a stampede at rapper Travis Scott’s [November 5] concert in Houston, authorities said Saturday.” A Slate.com article noted:
Police and the media floated a bizarre story about a possible culprit. TMZ reported that a mystery assailant wielding a syringe loaded with drugs was injecting people, causing some to unwittingly overdose. Somehow, this alleged assailant is thought to have set off a panic that triggered a stampede among a crowd of over 50,000 people.
Despite news media headlines claiming that police had “confirmed” the needle attack at the Astroworld concert that began with a security guard, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner soon debunked the rumor: “We did locate that security guard. His story is not consistent with that. He says he was struck in his head. He went unconscious. He woke up in the security tent. He says that no one injected drugs in him.”
The following month, another alleged needle attack occurred, this one in Manhattan. WABC News reported on December 13 on the incident:
Two concertgoers were apparently punctured in the buttocks, possibly with a needle, while attending a rap concert at Irving Plaza Sunday night. Police say the victims, a 17-year-old male and 21-year-old woman, were both jabbed while at the Sleepy Hallow concert around 10 p.m. Detectives believed they were both punctured by the same female concertgoer, likely armed with a needle.
The attack was never confirmed, and the woman armed with a needle was never found.
A History of Needle Attacks
Strange as the rash of incidents was, it was not without precedent; reports of, and fears about, needle-wielding strangers are not uncommon. In 1989, for example, dozens of women in New York City claimed to have been attacked with needles while in public. Karen Tumulty of The Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday, November 4, 1989:
Groups of teenage girls have jabbed dozens of Upper West Side women with sharp pointed objects in recent days. … As of Friday, 39 women, ranging in age from 14 to 50, had reported being jabbed since October 24. … The [accused] girls are reported to be black, and all but one of their victims have been white.
This conclusion led to the investigation being treated as a hate crime (though the attackers reportedly said nothing, including racial epithets). Reporting by James McKinley Jr. in the November 1, 1989, New York Times added, “In most of the cases, the women were walking alone on the street and felt a pricking from behind as a group of black teenagers passed them.”
A police officer reported that “the jabbings happened quickly, with the attackers disappearing almost instantly. In some cases the victims have not even noticed the wounds until later,” a feature reported in U.K. nightclubs some thirty years later. Rumors circulated that the needles were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and public health officials tried to calm fears by noting that the chances of contracting AIDS from such an assault were very remote. As in the United Kingdom, as fears spread people began wearing heavy clothing to protect themselves from the alleged assaults. Mayor Ed Koch offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspects, though none ever emerged, and the reports soon subsided.
The idea of being attacked by invisible, elusive, and unknown people or entities is understandably terrifying. Social context plays an important role in these panics, and scary rumors reflect social anxieties. In the late 1980s, AIDS was widely feared. Folklore from the 1980s and 1990s often featured rumors of gay men wielding AIDS-infected needles in public places, trying to harm or kill others. The attacks had many of the hallmarks of Fortean phantom attackers (such as by the Mad Gasser of Mattoon and the Monkey Man) and, as noted, even alien abductions.
The assumption that the New York City attackers were black was, of course, not a coincidence; it fit preconceived notions of criminality. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the assumption that the club attackers were male also fit preconceived notions of threat, especially coming soon after two high-profile murders of British women, Sabina Nessa and Sarah Everard—though neither of them were connected to nightclubs or drug injection.
As noted, social media played a large role in spreading the fear, just as it has in other similar scares, including the Blue Whale Game and the Momo Challenge, both of which I’ve written about in this magazine (see, for example, the May/June 2019 issue). Those rumors turned out to be false yet frightened millions of people. As Prof. French concluded, “If the threat of spiking by injection is indeed imaginary, it is not only causing unnecessary stress and anxiety, especially amongst young women, but it risks diverting attention and resources away from tackling the very real threats of male violence against women that continue to plague society.”