This is a very scary and very real account of what happened to a friend of mine at Bar Rouge in Shanghai. I’ve heard similar stories in Beijing and one can only surmise that Rohypnol is creeping its way into China’s bar scene. Hope this posting will encourage people to be extra careful at bars and make sure to stick close to your friends!
(Below posting is submitted on behalf of a contributor)
It was just what we had planned: a table out on the terrace with view a across the Huangpu river and down the Bund, hanging out, catching up and sipping on our drinks. Inside, the bar was packed with people; locals, expats and tourists alike, having a fantastic time, obligingly being awed by the bar tender's habit of periodically setting the bar on fire. As the music got louder, my friends and I decided to head in to do some dancing, not all that easy with how many people were in the bar, but we managed nonetheless. I'm sure we chatted to people, people we didn't know. But we're responsible girls and know about protecting our drinks and watching out for our friends, and this wasn't our first time out, so we weren't worried. I'm assume the rest of the night went wonderfully for everyone else in the bar, I'm not sure though, because I don't remember a thing.
From standing by the bar chatting to my friend, to waking up in my hotel room bed the next morning with my friends worriedly watching over me, I remember nothing. The story, according to my friends, who I was lucky to have with me that night, is that I went from being fine, to excusing myself to go to the bathroom, to being slumped over the sink in the bathroom, in a matter of minutes. I was with girls who've known me for years, people who knew that my sudden inability to move, or even hold my own head up, was not a result of alcohol. Someone had drugged my drink.
According to my friends, they had to have me carried out the bar, and into a waiting taxi. Worried that something was really wrong with me, they asked the cab driver to take us to the nearest hospital. The hospital was suspicious of what was going on, and decided to call the police, who in turn called the manager of the bar. The doctors, the police and the manager all insisted to my very panicked friend that I was simply drunk, clearly assuming that I was the type of girl who has had her stomach pumped on numerous different occasions (I haven't, I've never even passed out from too much alcohol before). Eventually, the manager realised that my friends were telling the truth and that my state was a result of someone drugging my drink in his high-end bar, not a result of 'a few too many'. He was kind enough to stay with my friends till they all decided that it would be okay to take me back to the hotel, and he paid the hospital for their services.
The next morning at the hotel, relieved that I was up and actually functioning normally, my friends recounted the story to me. Filling me in on the entire night and everything I couldn't remember. Needless to say, I was traumatised for the rest of the day, rest of the week even. The scary thing is not the way it turned out (if it had to happen, then I'm glad it happened the way it did), but the way that it could have turned out. I could have been with people who hadn't known me for years, people who would have just assumed that I was drunk, people who would have left me to fend for myself. There was clearly someone in the bar that night who had slipped something into my drink, whether he (or even she) did it just to see what would happen, or if the person actually had a plan of how the evening would progress once I had ingested the drug, who knows. I do know that I wouldn't have been able to stop anything from happening that night, and I probably wouldn't have remembered well enough to do anything about it after.
This happened at one of the nicest bars in Shanghai, to a girl who was clearly there in a group that was looking out for one another, so it could happen to anyone, anywhere. If you see a really drunken girl the next time you are out, maybe stop to think about whether she really is just drunk, or its something worse than that.
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