SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Sip Safe wristband lets you dab on a drop of your drink to test if it's been spiked.
You learn the rules early when you go to gigs, festivals and bars: Always keep an eye on your drink. Watch out for strangers. Be careful who you leave your glass with.
But now an Australian invention could change that (and put less onus on young people -- especially women -- to completely change the way they act when they're out).
The Sip Safe is a wristband designed for concerts and festivals that lets you test for drugs in your drink. Dab a drop of your drink onto the two spots on the band, wait two minutes till the liquid dries, and if the spots turn darker blue, that's a sign that your drink could have been spiked.
It's not the first invention designed to make drink safety easy -- we've seen drug-testing drinkware, sensors that look like swizzle sticks and even nail polish that tests for date-rape drugs.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:52PM (17 children)
Practically speaking, there is only one date rape drug, and this tool purposely ignores it. It's alcohol. Everything else is a rounding error. Testing for the exotic drugs is only slightly less crazy than testing for polonium, VX, and Sarin. Nearly every problem involving a drug in a drink is plain old ethanol alcohol.
The usability here is a joke too. Sure, it is sort of easy... but doing that test would send the wrong social message. If you want to send a message of "I don't trust you at all because you're a creep" then this is how you do it.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:31PM (12 children)
Citation needed.
Do you trust people by default? I don't, and I don't expect people to trust me by default. People can be horrible. You can like a person and not think they're creepy while still wanting to hedge your bets. I casually dated a girl who had PTSD (she'd been drugged and raped) and in the beginning she would explicitly follow me between rooms so she could watch while I mixed drinks. It was a bit awkward, to be honest, but I totally understood where she was coming from. I can't expect you to know I'm not a rapist just because I know I'm not a rapist. I also feel like you could use this thing discretely in a lot of circumstances, especially with a fake sip (closed lips) and some conversation to buy time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:18PM (4 children)
This article [theguardian.com] presents a good summary of several earlier studies on this issue...
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:02PM (3 children)
The study with 3,303 cases is paywalled, but the abstract says
I'd like to know more about methodology, as it sounds like the authors themselves have reservations. How quickly was the urine collected and analyzed? The other statements in the abstract seem to be saying that they can't prove a link, but they don't say they've ruled it out. This might be a case of popsci reporting going further than the researchers themselves. I didn't look for the details of the study with 101 cases; even if it were conducted perfectly, the margin of error would be so high that calling a lack of evidence a statistical anomaly would be a stretching of the term. Any variable condition is a statistical anomaly if you have a small enough sample size.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:02PM
Statistical anomaly, rounding error, you know what I mean.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @11:50PM (1 child)
This is not the case. Sample size influences the margin of error but a small sample size does not imply a large error.
The margin of error in sampling is entirely determined by three factors, all of which are controlled by the researcher: the sample size, the desired confidence level (typically this is chosen to be 19 times out of 20), and the "complexity" of the question being answered by sampling. (This "complexity" has an objective mathematical definition based on shattering sets and fun stuff).
With a sufficiently simple question, a very small sample size gives low error and/or high confidence. Suppose I have a crate full of papayas and I want to know what proportion of the papayas are tasty. I could select 100 papayas uniformly at random from the crate, eat them all, and conclude that the proportion of tasty papayas in the crate matches the proportion of the sample. This will give a certain margin of error for any desired confidence level, which can be calculated. For example, if I find that every one of the 100 sampled papayas was delicious it is vanishingly unlikely that the true proportion of bad papayas in the crate is more than 50% (this would represent a large margin of error but a tremendously high confidence level).
In practice, the calculations normally go the other way, one fixes the margin of error and confidence interval and then calculates the required sample size.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday April 25 2018, @03:03AM
All your Bayes are belong to us. We were discussing a rounding error, which is < 1%. With a sample size of 101, you have a perfectly reasonable chance of missing a small but > 1% effect. I'm not saying the study is bunk -- I haven't looked into it -- but they'd have to be dealing with ridiculous priors to come up with the sort of numbers we're discussing from a pool of 101 with a high level of certainty.
In my anecdotal dealings with academics, sample sizes seem to often be based on percieved funding and availability rather than preconceived notions about probabilities.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:21PM (2 children)
high dose of EtOH (Ethanol CH3CH2OH) is a real good promoter of anterograde amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia#Alcohol_intoxication [wikipedia.org]
And anterograde amnesia is the effect of the supposed rape drug GHB in high dose or in smaller dose combine with EtOh. GHB is kinda hard to get (you will have to trust a polydrugs user on that) and unless you have acces to high grade GBL it is hard to synth . I guess that if your okay with muder you could use fentanyl but I am not so sure that a quick comma is really what rapist want...
using something else than EtOH, is not only not cost effective, it is improbable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:25PM
by hard synth I meant not something I can do safely in my basement without getting on some watchlist
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @11:24PM
better than a period
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 25 2018, @01:15AM (3 children)
I read GP's post, and it made sense. Alcohol has been the number one inhibition reducer used by men and women alike since time immemorial. The malicious use of other drugs probably does amount to little more than a rounding error compared to the intentional use of alcohol. On any given Saturday night, there have to be millions of young women who head off to the bars, intending to get half drunk, and get laid. The only other drug that comes close, for frequency of use, would be cannabis. Most other drugs have other purposes than leading to sexual intercourse.
Just think that through, and date rape drugs are almost certainly nothing more than a rounding error in seductions scenarios.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday April 25 2018, @01:32AM (2 children)
The topic was rape, not seduction. Were the topic seduction, I wouldn't be asking for citations (though I would be opposed to calling sex with a roofied person "seduction" unless it was part of some fringe fetish they consented to beforehand). If alcohol is used to debilitate a victim to make them easier to rape, it's obviously a date rape drug in that context. I could totally see non-alcoholic sedatives being used in < 1% of drug related rapes, but I'm not convinced of it.
Yes, I know, mutually agreed upon sex between drunk people is now considered rape by some folks, but that isn't the definition most people are using. Damn it Runaway, you're supposed to be the shitlord, not me!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:01AM (1 child)
Well, I'll point out that there are many different kinds of "rape".
To gain support, empathy, or sympathy, women really ought to come up with some new words to describe those various levels of unwanted attention from the other gender.
If Daddy's Little Girl goes to the bar, and gets thoroughly intoxicated, hoping to attract a sex partner, then wakes in the morning to find the *wrong* sex partner sleeping beside her, I really don't see "rape".
On the other hand, if DLG has been drinking soda, coffee, or water all night long, and someone slips that date rape drug into her drink - I see a big problem.
Ehhh - people love their drama, don't they? And, how do you become a shitlord for having pointed out an obvious truth? Oh. I think I get it. People are pretty shitty, so you become a shitlord for having pointed that out. Got it.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:09AM
Yeah, that's a fair addendum. If the sober self was forced into a state of non-sobriety, rather than consenting to it, decisions made in that state don't necessarily have the consent of the sober self. You can't just slip somebody LSD and then convince them to give away all their worldly possessions... well, you can, but it's a dick move.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:42PM (3 children)
The only people that I've known who ingested spiked substances did so via joints. I'm not sure what my female smoked, but people don't normally pass out from smoking pot. The other acquaintance smoked a joint laced with crack.
Drinks themselves probably do get spiked occasionally, but the whole process is rather convoluted to the point where it seems particularly foolish. Alcohol consumption, even for a minor, carries low risk of prosecution, especially if there's date rape drugs found in the blood stream afterwards. But, other substances can result in larger consequences and as such the accuser has far less leverage in the situation as the prosecutors are likely less willing to agree to a deal to bring things to trial against the alleged rapist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:24AM (2 children)
So the root problems are the fucked up "substance" laws.
When will activists for (some) rape victims begin calling for a more libertarian approach to "substances?" Or at least decriminalization. Or at least, here's a concept: requiring a mens rea that's a tad bit higher than some nebulous, undefinable "devil worship." Says here on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: "In jurisdictions with due process, there must be both actus reus ("guilty act") and mens rea for a defendant to be guilty of a crime (see concurrence). As a general rule, someone who acted without mental fault is not liable in criminal law. Exceptions are known as strict liability crimes."
So there it is in a nutshell; this is the heretofore unexplained (to me at least) factor that prevents rapes from being reported. Therefore, I cannot take certain rape activists seriously unless they at least move to end strict liability drug laws. Do that, and we've massively empowered (some) rape victims. And that was what this was all about, right?
Well, not yet. That's not a complete solution. Why are we funding police departs to become militarized in lieu of working through the well-known backlog of rape kits? Where is the activism to get that problem fixed?
Instead the proposed solutions become increasingly absurd and anti-democratic. Certain activists are working against due process (q.v. prior link) when what their cause needs is more complete due process.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:56AM (1 child)
No, the root of the problem is that there are people out there that don't feel that the laws apply to them, legalizing things would make it somewhat more easy to report the crime, but not necessarily actually reduce the problem as then you'd have somebody doing one type of drug and arguing that the other one wasn't consented to.
People make all sorts of specious arguments for legalizing things that have, in most cases, very real downsides from a societal aspect. Granted, pot probably shouldn't be legal, but if pot is legal, it's likely that these same people will find other things to slip the drugs into.
Not to mention that most rape accusations are amongst people that know each other, not strangers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @03:44AM
It seems you expect to just simply be privileged enough to never become victimized by a criminal, to the extent that you're willing to pursue an anti-democratic agenda.
Let me know when men and women both become angels. You and the VIM guy need to get together. I'm looking forward to the paradise where the body is capital and rape just magically doesn't happen unless it's stipulated in voluntary agreement.