The drug can put you asleep in 15 to 20 minutes, right?
@jonri, where does it say the presumptive cop quoted in the original piece doesn’t know that Ambien can be used as a date rape drug? Or is the point that we should assume a woman with a prescription for Ambien who has it in her system was not taking her prescription but instead was given the drug by a nefarious guy?
@dstark, what salient details do you find missing from the story about the six year old?
It is supposed to help people to fall asleep faster when they try to sleep. It’s more like benadryl than propofol. But like alcohol, people have different reactions to it, especially outside the recommended dosages. Some people get euphoria from taking ambien and staying up. I have no doubt that predators try to use it, too.
Ambien as a party drug is not intuitive to me, but neither are vodka shots, and millions of people use those at parties. I’d be a rag doll after one! I was at a party in law school where one guest brought a handful of Ativan as a hostess gift. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen them sitting on the bar next to the Jose Cuervo. Chacun a son gout, I guess.
@Ohiodad51, I have no idea what the two kids were doing to each other. How long? Were there warnings? Should there have been warnings? Are any of the parents nuts? Anybody who works in the school nuts? Does the boy have other issues? Why a suspension? How accurate the story is. I have more questions. That’s enough.
Reads like sensationalist journalism to me.
The article caught your eye. The headline caught my eye.
Ambien is a date rape drug. Why did the writer not mention this in the article? How does the writer know who put Ambien in a person’s system. Drinking alcohol and taking Ambien is pretty dangerous, isn’t it?
@Hanna, thanks. I don’t get a lot of this drug and drinking use.
I would presume that the women reported taking it not that they didn’t know they had been given it or the detective would not have written the comment the way he did.
I urge EVERYONE to watch “The Hunting Ground”. It’s available on Netflix. There is a very small number of false reports when it comes to sexual assault. Even if a person really is a victim, they are discouraged by their institutions to report because they do not want to be labeled as a “rape school”. Many assaults actually go unreported because of the victim blaming culture that has been created. There are very few people who would willingly put themselves into that negative light if they didn’t feel that they were truly violated.
@dstark, sorry, but a kid who hasn’t hit puberty yet isn’t sexually assaulting anyone. Come on. In 4th grade you are what, 10? Did you even know what sex was at 10? And you want the background on the case against the 6 year old?
@Ohiodad51, I would like to know what really happened.
By the way, your puberty comment is false. You don’t have to be in puberty to sexually assault somebody.
Yes. I knew what sex was at 10. We were taught sex ed in schools.
I doubt the 6 year old sexually assaulted anybody. There was probably a huge over reaction.
I actually think it’s pathetic on the part of the adults, parents, teachers and administrators at schools to not be able to handle elementary school-age behavior without hiding behind a sledgehammer disciplinary rule. I swear, the world is rapidly become devoid of rationale thought and critical thinking skills.
In answer to your first question, it doesn’t. However,IMO, if the cop knew it was, he would have said something along the lines of “Although Ambien can be used as a date rape drug, in all of the cases I dealt with, the woman who alleged she was raped had taken it knowingly.” Say 12 young women who were raped were shoeless. Would you just assume that all 12 were walking around barefoot? Or would you think it’s possible that at least some of them were the victim of some oddball who took their shoes as trophies? There’s no way to know one way or another without further investigation. I think your cop has assumed that all young women with Ambien in their systems took it voluntarily. I don’t claim to know one way or the other. Ambien is abused for its euphoria qualities by some people, including young women. But from what I’ve read its abuse isn’t so common among college kids that it’s likely to have been taken voluntarily by a lot of rape victims. If he’s seeing that many young women who claim rape with Ambien in their systems, this makes me think that it’s probable that at least some of the women involved were drugged. YMMV
In answer to the second question, you are assuming that all of the women who had Ambien in their systems had prescriptions. I think that highly unlikely. Again, we don’t know from this article whether or not they do. Some of the women who ARE abusing Ambien don’t have a prescription for it; they get it from friends or buy it. So, the mere fact that they don’t have a prescription doesn’t prove one way or another whether they took it voluntarily. Nor does the fact that a woman HAS a prescription prove much of anything. That doesn’t mean that on the night of the alleged rape she took it voluntarily. There may well be a woman who took if to get some sleep when she was tense during exams or to help through a romantic break up or…and got a prescription for it, doesn’t abuse it, and months later, says she was raped, has Ambien in her system, and admits she has a prescription but says she didn’t take it that night.
This is one of the reasons Ambien is being used as a date rape drug. It’s easy to get your hands on it. Another is that my understanding that it dissolves easily in wine and leaves no taste.
Potentially, but it’s a stretch for me as my only anecdotal knowledge is that my college son said that he knew women used Ambien but none of the guys he knows use Ambien. I asked him why the women and not the men and he said “because girls are always worrying about calories.” I didn’t get it at that moment, but then I 'got it". If they are going out they can pop an Ambien early and have a shot or two and get the same sensation minus the calories of additional shots or beer. It’s the reason he told me they drink Vodka and not beer…calories. Seems plausible and why would guys need to slip women Ambien if they are taking it on their own. But I’m most curious why Ambien is so commonly prescribed to young healthy people, the only explanation that seems plausible to me is that the kids are taking Adderall and they are having trouble sleeping so the doc adds Ambien to the mix.
Of course, if college women are commonly using Ambien on their own, that could be a smokescreen for a predator to use Ambien as a date rape drug, since detection of Ambien would be less suspicious than detection of other drugs which are less commonly used.
"…sorry, but a kid who hasn’t hit puberty yet isn’t sexually assaulting anyone. Come on. In 4th grade you are what, 10? Did you even know what sex was at 10? "
This is a brave, new world, @Ohiodad51.
That being said, I remember this case (the six year old kid) and in the end it all seemed completely innocent and at a child’s level with no deeper darker shades of anything more than a gesture of warmth and affection. (I think it was still uninvited and disallowed.)
I have no idea what point you are driving at, but obviously the answer is it depends. If the 12 young women were on a beach in the summer, maybe they were walking around barefoot. If they were in downtown Buffalo in January unlikely they were walking around barefoot. But I think you miss the point the presumptive cop is making about the use of Ambien. Assume the fact pattern laid out in the piece. Now add two things. One, a blood test that shows Ambien in the girl’s system. Two, that the girl either had a prescription or a provable history of taking Ambien. How in the world are you going to prove that the Ambien came from the evil guy in this one instance?
Speaking of assumptions, here is what the guy actually wrote:
I did in fact assume that when the guy wrote “these kids pop their daily prescribed dose before or during the pregame, effectively “roofieing” themselves before they even leave the house” he understood the term “roofie” and “prescribed” and was using those terms in the commonly understood manner.
Constructing an argument from the quoted statement to support the premise that this guy has no idea Ambien is a date rape drug and that he assumes every woman with ambien in her system is taking a prescription is a huge stretch. Almost as big of a stretch as deciding that this guy doesn’t know what he is talking about because he appears unfamiliar with some study on historical binge drinking and said that while he went to a party school in the nineties where there was a lot of drinking, “kids today” drink to get black out drunk.
Add that to what my son said about girls saving calories and getting the same affect…I suspect the detective said exactly what he said about “roofieing” themselves…I suspect he was talking about women and I suspect my son really does know girls that “save calories” with Ambien otherwise he would never have told me that. As the guy said maybe it’s a regional thing who knows…ask your college age kids, they probably know.
The writer in the original post had a narrative and he didn’t mention Ambien as a drug rape because that doesn’t fit his narrative.
Adderall stays in a person’s system for 1 to 3 days so if a person takes adderall and ambien ( I have no idea if people do this) and ambien shows up in a person’s system, adderall will too.
@dstark, what does roofie mean then?
“Roofieing themselves”
@Ohiodad51 We’ll just have to agree to disagree. You say:
I grant you—I conceded the point above—that it’s possible that each and every one of the alleged victims had a prescription for Ambien. THAT is what the cop is saying; he isn’t even recognizing that some of those abusing Ambien don’t have prescriptions.However, to me–and again YMMV----if you are seeing lots and lots of cases of alleged victims having Ambien in their systems, it’s at least POSSIBLE that SOME of the alleged victims did NOT take it voluntarily the night they say they were sexually assaulted because we know some rapists administer it to their victims. SOME fraction of this group may not have a prescription and/or a history of taking Ambien. ANOTHER fraction may have one or the other, but STILL not have taken it voluntarily the night they allege they were sexually assaulted. As to the latter group, you say
It’s going to be very, very hard, but that doesn’t mean that there is not a single case in which it DID. @ucbalumnus makes that point when she says
Personally…I realize you disagree…I think it’s extremely unlikely that if it’s very, very common for an alleged rape victim to have Ambien in her system that each and every one of those alleged victims took it voluntarily because while Ambien is definitely abused, it’s abuse isn’t THAT common.
I have all kinds of problems with that statement. The cop seems to be saying that he actually knows that each of the alleged victims has a prescription and takes her daily dose before or during the pregame. I think that’s extremely unlikely. I think it’s virtually certain that some of the alleged victims who do use Ambien to intensify the effects of alcohol don’t have prescriptions at all and/or exceed their prescribed dosage. Moreover, I think that if it were that common for those taking Ambien in their daily prescribed dose to end up alleging they were sexually assaulted, the campus health facilities would stop handing them out like “candy.” If they didn’t, they would be opening themselves up to some serious legal liabilities.
Nope, I think that some young women are abusing Ambien by mixing it with alcohol. I think some young women are being sexually assaulted while both Ambien and alcohol are in their systems. I just don’t assume that everyone in the second group is also in the first.
@Ohiodad51 If you haven’t read Alice Sebold’s book “Lucky” read it.