Inside Britain’s hidden drink-spiking epidemic

Two weeks after it happened, Sharon Gaffka called the hospital. She wanted to know what the doctors had done to her while she was unconscious, why there had been cannulas in her arm, whether they had tested her for anything, whether they knew what had happened.

It was the first day restaurants reopened after Covid in July 2020, and Gaffka had gone out to brunch with her girlfriends at a fancy restaurant in southwest London. She remembers what she was wearing — T-shirt, jeans and trainers — and what she drank — one bellini cocktail.

She remembers the guys on the next table coming over, then suddenly feeling very ill. “I wasn’t drunk, I know I wasn’t,” says Gaffka, now 28, who was then a civil servant. “This was a whole different feeling.” She remembers standing at the bottom of the stairs, trying to work out how to get to the lavatory at the top, then going into the cubicle. Then blank.