Drink spiking survivors have opened up about their terrifying experiences from collapsing to losing control of their body as new figures reveal more than one in 10 Britons are victims.
Mark Ackred, 47, said he was spiked when he was attending a family festival in the summer of 2021 while looking after his daughter and son, who were 11 and seven at the time.
The 47-year-old, from the Cotswolds, said he sipped from a glass at a wine tasting event, which was his first alcoholic drink of the day, and within minutes he felt faint. He said he then stumbled out of the tent, before collapsing and being “out of it” and unable to remember anything for seven hours.
“I felt weird, then really bad,” he told The Independent, describing how his head was lolling and he was incoherent. “I went home, and felt horrific for the next two days.
“For my children, it was really scary. I was the parent in charge.”
It was his daughter, now 15, who had to rush to get help at the time. Mr Ackred said the incident has had a lasting impact on both her and his son, now 12, with both now more hesitant about going out.
He is opening up about his experience as new data reveals that spiking, and concerns about being spiked, is reaching critical levels in the UK.
CounterSpike’s survey of 3,000 UK adults in June found that 6.6 million (12 per cent) of Britons have been spiked during their lifetime, and a further 11.7 million (22 per cent) know someone who has been.
The research comes after the government pledged to introduce a specific offence to cover spiking, aiming to make it easier to prosecute those who administer harmful substances without consent. The new offence has been created under the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently moving through its final stages in parliament.
Couple Sara and Stephen Ridgewell have also spoken about the terrifying time they were spiked while at a former colleague’s engagement party in February 2023. They said they had three or four drinks during the time they all travelled to the venue on a minibus and for one-and-a-half hours once they had arrived, which included Prosecco from a bottle that only they drank from. After that, they said they cannot remember much at all for hours.
Ms Ridgewell, 43, said: “We were both very scared and shocked this could happen. We were out as a couple with people we knew, and assumed we were in a safe environment where we could relax.”
The couple said they woke up in a budget hotel, with no recollection of how they had got there. Piecing together the few vague memories they had of the night, they said they discovered Mr Ridgewell, 46, had wet himself, which had never happened before, and also cut his head after falling over.
The 46-year-old said: “It’s such a scary thing – I’ve been out a million times for drinks with friends – something happens where you don’t know where you’ve been. I wasn’t in control of my body. It was such a worrying experience to have gone through. Afterwards, piecing together what could have happened, it’s the what could’ve happened that’s really scary.”
The couple said they spent the days after the incident feeling awful and have become hypervigilant since. They advised others to always be aware of their surroundings and to never take their eyes off their drink, with anyone a potential target of perpetrators.
Mr Ackred set up CounterSpike in the wake of what happened to him. The company has now developed a spiking test kit, SpikeStixx, and also teamed up with charity Spike Aware UK to draw awareness to the dangers of spiking.
Nearly half of all adults (44 per cent) are worried about being spiked on a night out, according to the new data, the majority of whom are women.
Aimee Glass, an 18-year-old student from Suffolk, told The Independent last year that she was spiked during freshers week in September. She said she started feeling unwell after having two drinks at the pub and another two drinks at a club.
“I had a wave of heat and sickness,” she said. “It was unlike anything I had experienced before. It was like no illness I had felt being drunk or sober. I was really scared because I was so unsure of what was happening. I couldn’t feel my limbs properly or speak properly. To my friends, I described the last moments of my vision as being like kaleidoscope vision and then my vision became very blurred.”
Ms Glass said she completely lost her vision within half an hour of feeling unwell – adding that she was unable to both walk or talk, not speaking for seven hours after being spiked.
Speaking of the spiking “epidemic” in the UK, Mr Ackred said: “It’s become so problematic. I feel there’s a lot of discussion and we need more solutions.”