Spiking is prevalent throughout the UK and it is not currently a criminal offence in its own right. Spiking can include adding alcohol or other drugs into food, drink or other forms of ingestion such as edibles, vapes or through needle spiking.

Everyone has the right to know exactly what is going into their body. There should be equal power and informed consent - anything else is spiking.

Various Home Office Select Committees are considering making drink spiking a separate criminal offence. The Home Office has until 26th October to feedback to the House of Commons Committee on the progress towards creating a separate criminal offence for spiking.

We want to highlight to The Home Office that the case to make spiking a separate criminal offence is supported across the UK, and this is not just related to drink spiking.

Currently, the police record this crime under other specific offence codes such as The Offences Against the Persons Act 1861 or The Sexual Offences Act 2003. These serious offences are recordable in their own right, however anything reported would be shown as included within that specific report due to the principal crime/finished incident rule.

Therefore, if a spiking incident occurred during a more serious offence, i.e. a rape or a robbery, spiking will not be the primary crime that is recorded.  

Police forces are making efforts to report incidents more fully but whilst spiking is not a separate prosecutable offence it makes it impossible to prove the true scale, and impact of this crime.

Nobody is immune the effects of drink spiking. Most of the information we have on spiking is from brave victims, or their families, telling their stories.

In addition, we want to highlight that if spiking becomes an separate criminal offence, it should not solely be related to drink spiking but should also take into account spiking in edible foods, drinks both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, vapes, needles and blowing noxious substances such as Devil’s Breath into people’s faces. All methods of spiking should be accounted for within any definition thereby identifying the true extent of all reported cases and holding the government and police forces accountable for addressing this hugely under reported crime.