Clubs and bars in California required to provide drink spiking tests under new law
Bar owners in California will be required to have testing kits available from July
From this summer, clubs and bars in California will be required to provide drink spiking tests under a new law.
Coming into force in July, the initiative is being enforced in a bid to make going out in local late-night venues safer. The kits typically include a strip, sticker, or straw that detects common spiking drugs such as ketamine or GHB. These are activated within minutes and a drink containing GHB will turn the strip blue, while drinks containing ketamine will turn orange.
“There’s no taste. There’s no scent. There is no color to them. They’re really tough to detect, but very fortunately, they’re easy to test,” said California State Assembly member, Josh Lowenthal, who helped spearhead the bill. “Just one drop of your drink onto a test coaster, and you know immediately if your drink has been spiked.” (via KTVZ)
Speaking about the new initiative, Rosemary Barrionuveo told local reporters in San Francisco: “It’s super important, especially as a woman being out at night and drinking alcohol. You don’t want to be at the wrong place, with the wrong people.”
The law – known as ‘AB 1013’ – applies only to venues with Type 48 licenses, which are establishments that serve alcohol but don’t sell food, including bars and nightclubs. The bill does not require businesses to offer the kits for free.
Bar owners in California will be required to have testing kits available from July, but it will be up to each venue as to whether they charge customers to test their drink.
The UK’s drink spiking laws are also in the process of being “modernised”, according to a recent report by the BBC, which includes training hundreds more door staff to stop potential perpetrators and investing in research into testing kits.
While the plans have been generally welcomed by campaigners, the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) are among those who have expressed disappointment over the failure to make spiking a specific offence in the UK.
Nearly 5,000 spiking incidents were reported to police in England and Wales in the 12 months since September 2022, according to statistics by the National Police Chiefs’ Council. The latest Ministry of Justice data suggests the conviction rate is very low.
Read the full BBC report here.
