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Making a point: Spain faces growing concern over unreported drinks spiking and assaults

By Jon Clarke, Josie Sharp and Rachel Gore

THE warning came out from the government and police in Madrid in early August, but it didn’t make giant waves in the media.

It came after four confirmed cases of spiking had taken place at Pamplona’s famous San Fermin festival the previous month and a serious one at a nightclub in Malaga in June.

Later that month Spain’s Equality Ministry began a series of initiatives to gather evidence and protect revellers at festivals and ferias around the country.

The so-called ‘violet points’ were set up to help victims and witnesses of sexual harassment.

Named after the colour connected to the feminist movement, they were rolled out 

 at Valencia’s Medusa Sunbeach Festival.

The country’s biggest electronic music festival, in Cullera, set up tents where partygoers could test their drinks for psychoactive drugs.

The simple drug tests can quickly discover if something has been slipped into anyone’s drink.

Samples are inserted into a test tube with a chemical re-agent and if the drink, for example, has the date rape drug GHB, it turns bright red. 

Sometimes called ‘purple points’ or ‘punta lilas’, as soon as there is a positive test the police are immediately called.

As the Olive Press reported when we launched our Smash the Spiking campaign a decade ago, the term ‘chemical submission’ was only just becoming a threat for women going out.

We soon realised that the so-called ‘spiking’ of drinks was happening more and more frequently.

And it was also happening to some men too, often to rob them as they left a club or bar, as it happened to a BBC sports reporter Alan Tait in Puerto Banus in 2014.

Alarmingly he fell into a coma after being given ketamine and the 45-year-old woke up in a backstreet with cuts and bruises to his head and face. His shirt had been removed and his trousers torn.

Some two years later in 2016 security boss James Hickey, 36, told the Olive Press was shocked at the increasingly brazen approach of criminals: “It’s very worrying as it seems that anyone is a target,” said the former Royal Green Jacket soldier.

“A police contact has warned me that crime related to spiking is very prevalent along the coast,” continued Hickey, who moved to Estepona after working in the Middle East for eight years.

“People need to make sure they are looking out for each other.”

The issue emerged again in 2022, when police confirmed there was an even more alarming threat to revellers who were being directly injected with a drug.

They reported the incidence of this type of crime, which is normally sexually motivated, increased from 14% to 35% in 2021 alone, with over 1,000 incidents reported.

And the problem appeared to increase, with many women reporting a small prick as they were out with friends.

However, out of the 300 so-called ‘pinchazo’ cases investigated across Spain, the tests extraordinarily revealed........

© Olive Press