Stories of drink tampering haunt the Yale party scene–but barriers to testing and a culture of silence have made the phenomenon largely untraceable.
I.
John ’27 was at a fraternity formal at Noa, a Thai restaurant on Crown Street, in spring 2024. John is “not the type to get blasted,” he told me, especially when he is out with a date, as he was that night. “I wouldn’t have embarrassed myself like that.”
But he hardly remembers anything from the event.
In fact, by his recollection, the night was a short one. He remembers sharing a drink with one of his friends. He remembers being at the formal for just a few minutes. John was shocked to hear, afterwards, from his friends that he had stayed for the entire event—roughly an hour and a half of his memory gone. He remembers telling his date he had to throw up. He remembers getting into an Uber and making it back to his residential college. “It was there that my body gave out. I couldn’t really move,” John said. His friends had to physically drag him inside until a First-Year Counselor (FroCo) spotted them. Concerned, the FroCo called the ambulance. John and the friend with whom he shared the drink ended the night at the Yale New Haven Hospital.
He is not sure what time he checked into the hospital, but believes he left at around 4 a.m., after waking up with a pounding headache on a stretcher in the hospital hallway. “I guess hospitals are pretty busy, and if you have a drunk, you are not going to waste an entire room on them,” he recalled. He wasn’t tested—he doesn’t know exactly why—but his friend was. His friend tested positive for Rohypnol.
Rohypnol, colloquially known as “roofies,” can be odorless and tasteless, and is one of the most commonly used drugs in drink spiking and date rapes, as it can slip undetected into a drink. Like John experienced, Rohypnol, a central nervous system depressant, causes memory loss, vomiting, headaches, and loss of mobility.
To this day, though he did not test himself, John feels certain that the fateful drink he and his friend shared was spiked.
John’s friends told him that for most of the night, before he lost his ability to speak, walk, or even stand, he seemed fine—just drunk—to those around him. Despite his seemingly normal presentation, he believes he was feeling the effects of having been drugged. “There’s a period of time when you seem fine, but you are actually already roofied, and you can’t remember anything before you collapse.”
The next day, after returning home from the hospital, John felt fine, aside from a lingering headache. But this episode had unfolded during finals period, and he quickly had to regroup and attempt to focus on his studies. As John tried to prepare for his exams, he found himself returning to the confusion of that night—a suspected drink spiking with no clear culprit or motive. Categorized as a “date-rape drug,” Rohypnol is commonly used to drug people to facilitate sexual assault. But John was not assaulted, adding to the disturbingly random and senseless feeling—what exactly had happened to him, and why?
I sought to understand the prevalence of experiences like John’s on Yale’s campus: nights out that seemed normal but ended with a blackout, sickness, and memory loss. Dozens of people I spoke to, either in interviews or informally, had a story, believing that they, a friend of theirs, or a friend of a friend had experienced drink spiking. I realized, however, that assessing the prevalence of drink spiking at Yale was not possible and, at this time, largely indeterminable. There is no data available on the number of Yale students roofied, let alone on the number of drink spikings happening in the City of New Haven. At every stage of the phenomenon, physically, medically, and legally, drink spiking enacts a disappearing act—it often goes unknown, undetected, and untraceable.
These barriers make drink spiking so difficult to measure and protect against. The tracking procedures that do exist are underutilized, as victims are clouded by either the drugs themselves, which often cause memory loss, impairing victims’ ability to advocate for themselves, or by shame and fear that they might be penalized for drinking underage.
Few people wanted to speak about their experience with suspected roofieing on the record. Some felt ashamed about being a victim, and others worried about damage to their professional future should they be named in this piece, particularly in connection with underage drinking. Those who did speak did so only under the condition of anonymity, and are identified as John, Jane, and Jessica.
II.
The last time the Yale Daily News reported about instances of drink spiking on Yale’s campus was in the 2018-2019 academic year. That October, the Yale Daily News covered a drink tampering incident at a suite party in Durfee Hall on Old Campus, after which two female students were hospitalized and one tested positive for Rohypnol. The incident was investigated by the Yale Police Department, but in an article months later, the Yale Daily News reported that no suspect had been identified.
College students are a higher risk group for drink-spiking, a 2017 study found. This past November at Cornell University, the Cornell Police received a report about a female student being coerced by several male students into taking Ketamine and possibly other drugs before being sexually assaulted at a fraternity, leading to the fraternity’s temporarily suspension and the Cornell Interfraternity Council’s decision to suspended all social activities the following weekend. According to The Guardian, the incident is under investigation, but no further reporting has emerged. Given the public nature of the incident, its communal response and reactions were similarly public, including in an editorial published by The Cornell Daily Sun, spurring dialogue in the Cornell community. At the start of this academic year, the Boston Police Department issued a community alert warning college students in the region against the dangers of “scentless, colorless, and tasteless drugs” such as Rohypnol. In California, the state assembly recently passed a law requiring state universities and community colleges to have free and accessible drug testing devices in health centers.
In New Haven, the number of publicly reported cases is sparse; so is the public conversation around drink spiking. The New Haven Police haven’t issued warnings, and the state of Connecticut hasn’t passed bills. Yet the lack of news coverage does not align with the magnitude of the topic in casual, campus conversations. Roofieing, particularly in the context of fraternity parties, is normalized in postings on Fizz, an anonymous social app. In December 2024, three posts referencing a fraternity’s reputation for roofieing each garnered over two thousand upvotes. One post, from early March, asked: “does anyone know if i can get tested for roofie drugs in my system?”
The five students I interviewed could all name at least one person who thinks they have been roofied. Ava Boston ’26, incoming Chief of Yale Emergency Medical Services, an undergraduate organization that provides standby coverage to Yale’s campus, noted, “I’ve had friends that this has happened to at Yale, or at least they believe it happened to them… It does happen here, and it’s extremely sad.”
Without large-scale institutional data, students have devised their own precautions and conceptions of the issue. Recent graduate Amanda Ivatorov ’24 spent her senior year studying drink spiking in the Yale community. She wrote to me that in her freshman year, multiple of her peers were roofied at a fraternity-sponsored, off-campus event. With guidance from two doctors at the Yale School of Medicine, Ivatorov designed a study of the student response to NightCaps, a commercially sold product placed on top of cups to protect against spiking.
Yale students in Ivatorov’s study completed a brief survey before they received a NightCap in February 2023, and were surveyed again in April and May 2023. The majority of respondents expressed worry about roofieing—of the one hundred seventy-one respondents, 60 percent agreed that “At social events on and near Yale’s campus, I am worried about drink spiking.” These results suggest a fear among many students, amplified by the perception of many that everyone around them has some connection to the issue.
But a true assessment of the prevalence is nearly impossible, as most cases of suspected drink spiking remain unconfirmed and are often either not investigated or unsolved.
III.
In Yale’s 2024 Title IX Report on the Higher Education Sexual Misconduct and Awareness, Yale women who experienced sexual assault with penetration involving physical force or inability to consent were asked whether they had been given drugs or alcohol without their knowledge or consent. Some—8.5 percent—said they suspected it, and another 10.3 percent said they did not know. None of the participants said they were certain.
Why do so many students who suspect their drinks have been spiked not get tested?
Some never make it to the hospital or receive medical care at all.
Jane ’28 believes her drink was spiked during a night out at a Yale fraternity earlier this semester. She was out with a group of friends and remembers receiving her last drink of the night—a vodka Sprite. She does not remember what happened next. “You could tell me I cartwheeled out of there and I’d believe you because I just have no clue.”
Like John, much of her knowledge of that night is pieced together from small moments she remembers and what her friends reported to her in the following days. She told me that her friends took her back to her suite, but Jane remembers little from the night. “Apparently, the whole way home I couldn’t walk on my own,” she said. “I had to be handed off to someone because I was so unstable with my walking, I was zig-zagging and pulling in different directions.” While she doesn’t remember this walk back to her dorm, she remembers lying on her friend’s floor asking, “Is this real?”
Then, she became “horribly violently ill.” She told me she was throwing up until the late afternoon the next day, and still shaking two mornings later. “I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink, I just kept throwing up everything,” she said. “I thought I was dying.”
Jane told me she did not seek medical services or get tested because she felt too sick to get herself to the Yale Health Center. “I didn’t want to have to put on clothes and leave my suite because I was so ill.” After vomiting for hours, throughout the night, and the following day, she still did not understand the extent of her memory loss and strange behavior from the night before—she did not yet suspect that she had been roofied.
Only after talking with friends and doing online research, hours after her incessant illness finally receded, did she begin to suspect she had been roofied. Her reaction to the drink that night had been abnormal. “I know my limits and this was within my limit,” she told me. She had never once been sick or thrown up after a night out. Jane spoke to a friend who also suspected she had been roofied on a different night but—like Jane—had not been tested. Both had had the same symptoms, and both came to assume that their drinks had been spiked. After online research, over a day later, Jane concluded it would have been “too late” or too expensive to get tested, especially after looking into hair follicle testing. Such testing can pick up drugs in the system longer than a blood or urine sample might, but costs upwards of $150. According to U.S. Drug Test Centers, one of the largest drug testing facilities in the country, Rohypnol typically passes through the system and is no longer detectable within twenty-four hours. Days later, Jane learned of another friend who had the same reaction after drinking at the same fraternity that same night out.
Perhaps Jane’s experience would have been different if someone had recognized her abnormal behavior that night. But drink spiking is essentially impossible to distinguish from normal intoxication, even with common sense and extensive training. During their training, FroCos are given scenarios about alcohol and drug-related situations. While FroCos are not trained to provide medical care, FroCo Trinity Lee ’25 explained that their training emphasizes looking out for students who seem to be “acting a bit off” or “out of character.”
Dean Tom Adams is Director of Yale’s Alcohol and Other Drugs Harm Reduction Initiative (AODHRI), which is focused on addressing alcohol and drug use on campus. Adams wrote that AODHRI primarily works “through educational programming, including the Work Hard, Play Smart course for incoming first-years, the ‘Talking About Alcohol’ guide for Yale College families, and trainings for student leaders including FroCos, CCEs, and Camp Yale Program Leaders.”
Symptoms of a drink spiking may not always manifest in obvious ways. Yale Emergency Medical Services acts as a standby service at Yale events, including First-Year Formal and Senior Masquerade, during which students may drink or arrive intoxicated. Boston shared that “a misconception about drink spiking is that sometimes people think it tends to be this big, dramatic thing,” whereas “sometimes it just looks like someone has drunk a lot more than they actually have.”
Adams wrote that “in any case where a person has an unexpected reaction to drinking, they should seek medical attention. If they suspect that their drink was spiked, testing is available from a medical professional.”
But testing is often not easily accessible. Hospitals have no standardized way to discern if a drunk patient has also been drugged, nor a protocol to drug-test intoxicated patients. The symptoms for alcohol intoxication and date-rape sedative drugs are the same, according to Dr. Jessica Stetz, an emergency medicine physician at Downstate Health Sciences University Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. “Honestly, you can’t tell the difference,” she said.
Stetz explained that “clinically, it doesn’t really change anything” to know whether a patient has been drugged or is simply intoxicated. There are no reversal agents, she explained, and no particular treatment. “If somebody has normal vital signs, no signs of trauma, and is comfortable, sometimes we just let them sleep it off.” She added that doctors do not test for roofieing since it does not change their medical management, unless a patient has requested a test and is hoping to collect evidence for a legal case or has told a story that raises particular concern.
Dr. Matthew Griswold, an emergency medicine physician and toxicologist at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, also said that it can be difficult to distinguish between an intoxicated or drugged patient. Griswold emphasized that without a specific request or a suspicious story reported by the patient or those accompanying them to the hospital, doctors are unlikely to test for roofie drugs. During confusing, late nights out, students arriving at a hospital extremely inebriated, or under the influence of drugs, may not know to request a test, or be lucid enough to do so.
There are tests, Griswold said, that are administered in some cases. A urinalysis conducted in the hospital can indicate “broad classes of drugs,” he explained, but such testing is “very broad strokes,” frequently showing false negatives. If someone is on anti-anxiety medication, for example, that may show up as a positive and not indicate to the physician what specifically the patient has consumed. More specific drug testing is not a part of standard protocol to test intoxicated patients because such tests have to be sent to a large national drug laboratory, and, according to Griswold, could cost several thousand dollars.
Stetz also mentioned a specific test kit used with victims of drug-facilitated sexual assault. The kit requires urine as early as possible from the time of suspected drug ingestion to maximize the amount of drugs detectable in one’s system and thus the test’s effectiveness. It is rarely deemed necessary or used. In the past twenty-five years, Stetz believes she has probably only done one such test.
John ’27 is not sure why he was not tested when he ended up at Yale New Haven Hospital. While he did not explicitly request testing, he recalled being told that the hospital didn’t have any more tests. He wonders if telling doctors he had taken an edible that night might have influenced their decision not to test. “Maybe they had my best interests in mind and it would have shown up, or maybe they didn’t believe me, or something like that,” he said.
Another suspected victim of drink spiking, Jessica ’28 was not tested at Yale New Haven Hospital, despite her friends’ request on her behalf. She and her friends had attended a party at a Yale sports house in December 2024. She and a male friend shared a drink, which they got from the student bartender at the party. She did not feel anything at first. “And then very soon, I think within like ten to fifteen minutes, both of us completely blacked out.” The next thing she remembers was waking up early in the morning in a hospital bed.
Neither she nor her friend remembered the rest of their night after they got that drink. The rest of the night was recounted to them by their friends. Their friends told Jessica that she seemed “very immobile,” “groggy,” and “not able to move.” She and her male friend, with whom she’d shared the drink, were both told by their friends that they had been throwing up. One of her friends called a FroCo, who subsequently called an ambulance. At the hospital, Jessica’s friends repeatedly kept trying to tell the doctors that they thought she had been drugged, but recalled that the doctors “were really not caring about that.” Jessica told me that in the morning, the doctors told her she was “over-intoxicated,” attributing her physical symptoms to her alcohol consumption that night. She was shown the results of a blood test—the only test done—that indicated she had alcohol in her system. A blood test would show the presence of particular drugs if such a specific panel had been requested—as far as Jessica is aware, such panels were not requested, though she is not sure.
After being discharged from Yale New Haven Hospital, Jessica and her male friend returned later that day to request drug testing: “We weren’t going to do much with the information. We were just curious because it was a very weird experience and we wanted to know for our own sake.” She said that hospital staff told them that they didn’t provide such testing. The two of them went to CVS and purchased the CVS Health Home Drug Test Kit, 14 Drugs for $37.99, a urine test that purports to identify fourteen drugs, including amphetamines, cocaine, ecstasy, and benzodiazepines, which can be used in drink spikings.
Both her and her friend’s at-home tests showed a positive for buprenorphine, an opioid. According to American Addiction Centers, mixing such a drug with alcohol is extremely dangerous, causing vomiting and impaired thinking, among other symptoms.
At-home drug tests available for purchase frequently have false negatives, Griswold explained, and can also show misleading positives, including as a result of prescribed medications that an individual may already be taking. He also highlighted the high cost of detailed drug testing sent to laboratories, a cost that Jane mentioned being wary of when researching the possibility of getting tested a few days after her suspected drugging. “We’re trying to be really mindful about not spending our patients’ money when unnecessary,” Griswold said, adding that doctors “are not always sure when we send that testing to somebody’s insurance that they will pick it up, in which case [the patients] are on the hook for a huge amount of money.”
Both Stetz and Griswold explained that testing that might pick up Rohypnol, for example, would only be useful for the court of law, detectives, or forensic work, and not for the physicians. Stetz said that if doctors utilize the test kit for drug-facilitated sexual assault, the results are not even sent to doctors. They are, instead, stored by law enforcement, according to the state’s rules of evidence.
In a statement, Tim Brown, Director of Communications at Yale Health, wrote that evaluations of intoxicated students at the Acute Care Department at Yale Health include a protocol for alcohol breathalyzer testing to assess the level of intoxication, with further evaluation based on the clinical team’s assessment. Like in the hospital, drug testing is not a part of the standard protocol. Acute Care closes at 10 p.m., meaning late-night emergencies often end up at the hospital, rather than Yale Student Health Services.
Urine drug testing, including testing for Rohypnol, is available, if a student requests it, through Quest labs within Yale Health during regular operating hours. “The half-life of these drugs means they clear the system quickly, making timely testing necessary,” Brown wrote, which means students suspecting they may have been drugged should seek testing as soon as possible. Testing provided in the Student Health or Acute Care at Yale Health, including a standard drug screen and a specific test for Rohypnol, is included in Yale Health’s Basic Student Health Services, and is free for students.
For Jane, however, by the time she was well enough to leave her dorm several days later and had suspected something would be wrong, it would have been too late for a urine test at Yale Health.
More complex forensic drug screenings are not performed at Yale Health, but instead at Yale New Haven Hospital. Brown wrote that they are performed “only in cases where an assault has occurred or is suspected/possible (i.e., the person has no memory of what happened and/or does not have anyone to account for their whereabouts).” In such cases, tests are free of charge. If a patient is not a possible victim of assault, they cannot request extensive forensic drug testing panels. If someone, like John, Jane, or Jessica, wanted to know if they had been drugged, the emergency room would only provide testing for a limited panel of substances. In such cases, patients would be charged for their tests.
IV.
For the few victims of roofieing who could confirm they were drugged and might go to the police, crimes often remain unsolved. Rohypnol, along with many other drugs used to facilitate drink spiking, is illegal in the United States under the Controlled Substances Act. Drink spiking is a felony.
But at a party, identifying a drink spiker is nearly impossible. John, who is himself a fraternity member, described the safety mechanisms in place at fraternity parties. Many frats have a member who stays sober the whole time to monitor the party. When working at the bar, John was trained to identify who was drinking shots if one person requested multiple, but he said, “There are so many people that I can’t possibly always make sure that everyone’s okay.” Presidents from four Yale fraternities did not respond to email requests for further comment on safety measures in place.
After a party, identifying a culprit may be just as hard. John was contacted by a detective from the New Haven Police Department—he is not quite sure how they got his name, but knows other students who suspected they had recently been roofied at the same restaurant, Noa, and wondered if they might have come forward to the police. Police records indicate that the detective received the complaint three days after the formal, and began speaking to students within a week. Beyond a conversation with a detective, John never heard any updates on the case: “I don’t think they did anything to be honest.”
John’s suspicions were essentially correct: police records from the investigation indicated that the investigator “did not develop any suspicion to believe the Noa staff had tampered with the complainant’s drinks or that they had knowingly provided alcohol to the minor complainants.”
Jessica did not consider reporting her suspected drink spiking after receiving positive results on the at-home drug test, because she didn’t think the incident could be feasibly traced back to any one person. “I feel like it would be a lot more mess and drama than we needed,” she said.
In an email, the New Haven Police Department wrote to me that they do “not have any statistical/data reports available regarding incidents of drink spiking, drink tampering, or date-rape drugs.”
Police records from the investigation into Noa cited individuals declining to speak with investigating police officers out of concern “about being identified and charged for consuming drugs/alcohol as a minor,” or possessing or using a fake ID, a criminal offense in itself. Yale has a medical emergency policy, in which if students request help for themselves or fellow students in medical need, they will not face discipline from the Yale College Executive Committee. Nonetheless, the policy states that this amnesty does not “protect [students] from criminal or civil liability or prevent investigation or other action by federal, state, or local authorities, including Yale Police.” John, Jessica, and Jane were all drinking underage.
V.
The act of drink spiking itself functions as an erasure—erasing John’s, Jane’s, and Jessica’s memories of their experience and stripping them of autonomy. Rohypnol and other drugs used in drink spiking make victims lose awareness, the capacity to make choices in the moment, and to remember what has happened to them. Jessica described the experience as “out of body, because you had no control.”
Without memory or clarity of what actually happened on a night out gone wrong, it’s difficult to tell one’s own story or understand who might be accountable. “I think it’s just hard not to blame yourself when it happens,” Jessica said. “It’s hard not to be like, oh, I should have been more careful about who I took a drink from, or I should have not done this or that.”
Ultimately, there are few protective measures in place. Ivatorov, who surveyed the student body, wrote to me that “It’s alarming that no harm-reduction measures have been standardized or broadly implemented that directly help students protect themselves,” including the NightCaps drink cover that she studied, or other drink testing mechanisms, like fentanyl test strips, which are now required at California State University and California community colleges.
Police records from the investigation into Noa emphasized the importance of testing to substantiate the “belief” that a drink had been drugged. Without proof, the detective ultimately wrote that they had not developed any reasonable suspicion that the “experiences of altered mental status were caused by the malicious actions of another person/s.”
In talking to John, Jane, and Jessica, it’s clear that the path to accessing tests is opaque and their availability is unpublicized. Not one of these three students knew that tests were available through Yale — for free. Without more testing and subsequent tracking of cases, it is impossible for students to know for certain what happened to them in frightening nights ending in memory loss and extreme sickness. Testing is also necessary for the Yale community to understand how prevalent this issue—which is certainly present in casual discourse—is in reality.
“Before I was roofied, I didn’t think that what happened to me would happen,” John reflected. Now, he’s more cautious when he drinks. But he’ll never really know what happened to him that night, or why.
-Odelya Bergner-Phillips is a first-year in Timothy Dwight College.
Illustration by Jessica Sánchez.