Back in high school, my BFF and I would occasionally get through a day by sharing a bottle of diet Minute Maid spiked with vodka. I feel like that’s the only acceptable form of spiking: when you do it to yourself or get agreement from another party ahead of time. Which I suppose has some other word, like “doctoring.”

Why we need a day to remind people not to be dicks—or, worse, that dicks like this exist—is sort of depressing. I guess this means it still happens with some regularity. Google informed me that Boston police said last New Year’s Eve that they had received 71 reports of drinks being drugged in 2024 compared to 107 in 2023. That’s a smallish number when you consider the size of the bar-going population of Boston, and it’s nice the number is going down.

But that’s also the number of reported cases. I suspect the number of unreported cases is probably a bit higher, if only because I number among them.

Back in the mid-90s when roofies were new on the scene, I routinely went to a swing dance club in Los Feliz called the Derby. At the time of this story, I lived in San Bernardino, which was an hour’s drive, give or take and depending on traffic. On this night, I ate at Del Taco on the way there, parked on the street, went in, and let a nice-looking guy buy me a beer. I drank half of it and felt … giddy. Way too giddy for a full stomach and a half a beer.

And then the guy started acting really weird, telling me we should get out of there and he’d take me home. No, you are not taking me home, sir. I live an hour away and I am not leaving my car here. But I am definitely leaving, and it will not be with you.

I’m not proud to say it, but in those days it was not exactly unheard of for me to drive myself home when I absolutely should not have. So I had an undeserved amount of confidence I could do it again this night. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I knew I wanted whatever was about to happen to be in my own bathroom and bed. So I ran away from him and got in my car and headed east.

I had been on the road about 15 minutes when I realized I was absolutely not going to make it. I knew I was about 10 minutes from my ex-boyfriend’s apartment in San Gabriel, so I pulled off the freeway and on to the boulevard where he lived. I remember I stopped at the light at the bottom of the offramp.

And honestly, that is all I remember. Next morning, I woke up in my ex’s bed, and he came in from the living room when he heard me groan. He was laughing. “Man, you were seriously gone last night. How the hell much did you have?”

“Half a beer.”

“Shut up. You don’t need to lie to me. How long have I known you? I KNOW that was at least four vodkas.”

“No, seriously, half a beer.” And I told him the story. And then had to ask, “uh, so … this is embarrassing. Where IS my car?”

He had stopped laughing and looked pretty angry when he realized what had happened to me, shaking his head and balling up his fists. But when I asked him to fill in the blanks, he grinned. “You did a good job,” he said. “I was sitting out there on the couch watching TV when you basically blew down my front door, announced you were going to pass out, and then did right where you were standing. So I dragged you to bed and then went to check if you’d hit a fire hydrant or anything—but you’d only parked a little bit crooked and taken up two spaces. I fixed it.”

So that’s my story of having my drink spiked. I was super freaking lucky. I didn’t stop going to the Derby, but I did stop letting guys buy me drinks. And I always finished a drink before I went to dance. The only down side to this story is that I never saw that guy again, either, so I never got to face that problem head on or solve it for anyone else. I reckon that was a lucky thing for both of us in the short run.