Nearly every college town has a bar scene and they’re not always safe. There should be a community effort to keep our downtowns safe.
Alcohol is already a powerful enough drug and in college, it can be easily overused. Alcoholism is something that needs to be talked about in college but there’s an even scarier issue among college students: date rape drugs.
A study on drugging in college found more than 1 in 13 students reported being drugged. If we applied that number to USD, which has around ten thousand students, that means about 770 students have been drugged while attending school.
It’s a shocking statistic.
It’s a common utterance while you’re at a bar to say, “Can you watch my drink?” While we say that all the time, we may forget why we need to keep a careful eye on our drinks.
Even though Vermillion is a smaller town, it still happens here. But what can we do to combat it?
As a community, we can collectively come together to try to ensure our safety. People downtown should be able to not only count on their friends but bartenders and other patrons at the bar.
If a person is caught trying to spike a person’s drink at a bar, they should be banned from that establishment. Not only that, but there should be serious legal ramifications.
Why? Because the intent behind many druggings can be sexual assault. A study found perpetrators drugged their victims for a multitude of reasons; 29% said they thought it would put the victim in the mood for sex, 21% said it would be easier to approach a drunk or drugged person for sex, and 43% drugged a person “for fun.”
If you’re drugging someone just “for fun,” you definitely have ill intentions. There’s no rational explanation behind taking someone’s power away for them for a good laugh; it’s obviously a means to victimize them.
Unfortunately, there is no law in South Dakota that sees the act of drugging someone illegal. The only law South Dakota currently recognizes is a federal law that makes it illegal for you to give out your prescription, or for someone else to possess your precription medicine.
Wouldn’t that be an effective law to introduce during this legislative period?
Although it’s not always fun to be the sober person in the group or the soberest, it’s important to ensure the safety of you and your friends. We can’t expect everyone to be good citizens or every bartender to watch everyone’s drink.
Speak up if you see someone spiking a person’s drink. If you know someone who is drugging others, report them to the police. If you’re a business that knows of these offenders, ban them for the sake of your other customers.
As a community, we should come together and end this disgusting trend of date rape druggings in Vermillion.
