Josephine is a fiddle player on Lower Broadway. She suspects that someone was hoping to steal her equipment and tip money when she was drugged last year — she collapsed in the bar, and entirely lost two hours of memory.
“When you’re drinking too much, you have a few memories,” says Josephine, who asks that we refer to her by just her first name. “I have a memory of the last thing that I saw, and there’s nothing else. I was just down. I’ve done my fair share of drinking, and it’s not normally like that for me. … I was no longer in control of myself physically, which is not in line with how I normally handle alcohol.”
A good Samaritan bartender took Josephine’s belongings for safekeeping, told the people milling around to leave her alone, and summoned a security guard to take her to the address on her driver’s license. Josephine says, all things considered, that was the best-case scenario. Similar stories — and worse — frequently circulate via social media and by word of mouth. But as real a problem as it is, it’s difficult to collect evidence of drugging and therefore prosecute those responsible.
The catchall term “roofie” is slang for rohypnol or flunitrazepam, a drug that can be used to treat insomnia and assist with anesthesia. Rohypnol manufacturers have long added a color and flavor to the drug to try prevent its use in assault attempts. But that isn’t always the case with older drugs and the generic version, explains Rebecca Bruccoleri, a toxicologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. What’s more, GHB and ketamine are FDA-approved drugs that are sometimes used similarly to rohypnol.
All three drugs can cause sedation, hypnosis or sleep, not to mention anterograde amnesia — meaning a person affected can’t form a new memory while under the drug’s influence.
“A lot of people don’t have any memory of the event, but this strange awareness that something happened,” says Bruccoleri.
The symptoms can be similar to what happens when a person has consumed a large amount of alcohol, though it’s different in its disproportionate effect compared to the amount of alcohol consumed. Bruccoleri says it can become especially dangerous if mixed with opiates already in a person’s system, or if the person aspirates their vomit.
Josephine knew herself well enough to know she hadn’t just been overserved. She contacted the police the next day, but says there wasn’t much they could do, considering she hadn’t been the victim of assault or robbery.
Looking at the data of those who file police reports following a drug-facilitated crime, it’s impossible to determine how many people suspected that they were drugged. Reports are categorized by crime, such as robbery or sexual assault, according to the Metro Nashville Police Department. There’s not a specific charge for drugging someone, either.
Drugging doesn’t even necessarily accompany a crime like assault or robbery. A source who has requested anonymity — we’ll call her Angela — says she was drugged at a concert at First Bank Amphitheater in Franklin. She tells the Scene she fell and broke her arm, and was taken home by a friend. Another source who we’ll refer to as Marina is a physician who says she was drugged while seeing her girlfriend’s band play on Lower Broadway. It’s happening to men, too.
“I don’t think that there has been a time where this has come up in conversation and somebody hasn’t had a first-person experience,” says Josephine, “whether it’s them, or whether it’s a friend who’s suddenly become incapacitated on a night out.”
Standard hospital urine tests do not pick up on these drugs, which are also flushed out of a person’s system within a few hours. If someone suspects they’ve been drugged, Bruccoleri recommends they go to the hospital immediately — and request further testing be sent out to another lab.
Lorraine McGuire, spokesperson for Nashville’s Sexual Assault Center, says she hopes to go one week without handling a sexual assault case with the victim being drugged at a bar. She recalls a 10-day period when the center had nine exams, and six were drug- and alcohol-related.
“We knew some of those had been drugged even though it didn’t come up in their system, because they were out, they had one drink, maybe two, and they blacked out,” McGuire says. “Well, nobody blacks out from two drinks.”
When a woman walks up to a bartender and orders an “angel shot,” the bartender knows it isn’t because she wants a drink. Angel shot is code — …
The Sexual Assault Center teamed with the Tennessee Department of Health and the Tennessee Coalition to End Domestic & Sexual Violence to create the Safe Bar program in 2018. The free program — which the Scene first covered in depth in 2021 — requires that at least half of a participating bar’s staff has had a two-hour training on bystander intervention to prevent sexual assault. As part of the program, the Sexual Assault Center provides materials including coasters that can detect ketamine and GHB. Once certified, the bar is included in the Safe Bar app’s listings.
In Nashville, the app lists Jackalope Brewing Company, Whiskey Bent Saloon, Diskin Cider, Sandbar Nashville, Lakeside Lounge, Dino’s, Fait La Force Brewing Company and Pearl Diver as bars that have been certified. It’s been a challenge to get bars to take part, McGuire says — fewer than 50 in the state have taken the organization up on the training.
“I should be able to go out and get as drunk as I want and not have to worry about being raped,” McGuire says. “We just want [bars] to be part of the solution to a problem that we have in our city.”
