More exaggeration?

About a week ago Dick Puddlecote and others blogged on the disparity between the estimated numbers of trafficked sex slaves being forced to work as prostitutes in the UK and the number that were found when someone actually bothered to look. In the way that Nu Laborg and its tame media usually do things an initial number of 71 grew to 25,000, and the actual number positively identified by the investigation was zip, nothing, nowt, nada, zero, nil, zilch, the middle of a donut. Now it looks like the dangers of spiked drinks may have been similarly overblown.

Widespread spiking of drinks with date-rape drugs such as Rohypnol and GHB is an "urban legend" fuelled by young women unwilling to accept they have simply consumed too much alcohol, academics believe.

Oooo, fuck. That's not going to go down well with the fems and the righteous All-Men-Are-Rapists mob.

A study of more than 200 students revealed many wrongly blamed the effects of a "bad night out" on date-rape drugs, when they had just drunk excessively.
Many are in "active denial" that drinking large amounts of alcohol can leave them "incoherent and incapacitated", the Kent University researchers concluded.
Young women's fears about date-rape drugs are so ingrained that students mistakenly think it is a more important factor in sexual assault than being drunk, taking drugs or walking alone at night.
The study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, found three-quarters of students identified drink spiking as an important risk – more than alcohol or drugs.
More than half said they knew someone whose drink had been spiked.
But despite popular beliefs, police have found no evidence that rape victims are commonly drugged with such substances, the researchers said.

Hang on. I once spent part of an evening wrapped around the bottom of the pedestal of the downstairs toilet, and despite hearing two of Pink Floyd's longer albums played in full on the stereo I was convinced I'd only been in there for twenty or thirty minutes. Shit! Someone must have spiked all that Guinness that I drank... or posshibly the half litre of Polisshh vlodka that I washeled the Guinninninnness drown with. Because obviously it couldn't possibly be as simple as the fact that I was completely off my dial.

Among young people, drink spiking stories have attractive features that could "help explain" their disproportionate loss of control after drinking alcohol, the study found.
Dr Burgess said: "Our findings suggest guarding against drink spiking has also become a way for women to negotiate how to watch out for each other in an environment where they might well lose control from alcohol consumption."
Co-researcher Dr Sarah Moore said: "We would be very interested in finding out whether the urban myth of spiking is also the result of parents feeling unable to discuss with their adult daughters how to manage drinking and sex and representing their anxieties about this through discussion of drink spiking risks."
Nick Ross, chair of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, commented: "There is no evidence of widespread use of hypnotics in sexual assault, let alone Rohypnol, despite many attempts to prove the contrary.
"During thousands of blood and alcohol tests lots of judgement-impairing compounds were discovered, but they were mostly street drugs or prescription pharmaceuticals taken by the victims themselves, and above all alcohol was the common theme.
"As Dr Burgess observes, it is not scientific evidence which keeps the drug rape myth alive but the fact that it serves so many useful functions."

Quite. But it comes with a downside. Aside from the fact that getting sphinctered, shagging some stranger whose probably also half in the bottle, and waking up and crying rape the next morning belittles genuine rape victims, sooner or later some girl is going to be drugged for real and raped, and her case is going to be weakened too. And for what? A rumour that makes a convenient excuse that's caught everybody's imagination and spread like wildfire. How does that do anyone any favours?