The Culture of Fear – The Roofie Myth
Posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago at 9:17 am. 2 comments
I’m currently reading The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner and I just read his discussion on the apparent rise in Rohypnol use in date rape cases. Barry calmly explains that all the while the big networks and government are publicizing this apparent rise in Rohypnol use, there is very little data to back up their claims. Quite the contrary actually:
“From mid-1996 through mid-1998, while the roofie scare was in full bloom, Hoffman-La Roche, the Swiss company that makes the drug, provided test kits to rape-crisis centers, hospital emergency rooms, and police throughout the country. Rape victims who believed they had been drugged were asked to provide a sample of their urine which was sent to an independent laboratory for analysis. Of the 1,033 tests returned, only six contained Rohypnol. About one-third of the samples contained no drugs; the remainder contained a variety of legal and illegal substances, alcohol being far and away the most common.”
Source:
The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner, 1999. Karla Haworth, “The growing popularity of a new drug alarms health educators,”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 July 1998, pp. A31-32; additional information provided by Hoffman-La Roche. (Testing was done by El Sohly Laboratories, a forensic toxicology facility certified by the National Institute of Drug Abuse.)
Rohypnol is more commonly used, though many of us are completely unaware, as a sleeping aid and by recreational drug users to ’simulate the effect of alcohol consumption’ without the alcohol. Instead, the media portrays the drug as the ‘date-rape drug’, ‘a loaded gun’ or ‘a weapon used to faciliate sexual assault’.
Though it is true Rohypnol can be used for such uses, let’s not be overly alarmed over it’s apparent rise as a date-rape drug, but instead educate the masses about it’s prescribed/intended uses and side effects, all the while teaching the youngsters of our generation to consume drugs, illicit or not, with reason, caution and safety.
A dose of truth would go a long way in this respect…
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