2,100 complaints were filed in 2022, a psychosis for few concrete cases

For Katherine Pierce *, 27, and her sister, there is no longer any question of setting foot in a nightclub. “I keep having nightmares. A man is trying to strangle me. He has a syringe. And the people around me on the dance floor are doing nothing”, she says. The two women filed a complaint after an evening at the end of August in a Bordeaux establishment. “I was dancing. I felt a scratch on my shoulder, and my sister like a needle. We preferred to leave. The next day, my sister started having pain in her arm.” She then discovers red patches on her body while Katherine has a small wound on her wrist.

>> TESTIMONY. The mystery of bites in the nightclub: “I felt a fairly sharp pain in the arm suddenly”, confides a victim

Cases like these, the Interior Ministry recorded more than 2,100 at the end of September, compared to just over 800 at the end of June. Just for the music festival, we recorded 80 complaints, as well as about twenty during the Bayonne festivals. During summer, “the phenomenon continued quietly“, explains Leila Chaouachi, pharmacist at the Paris addiction monitoring center which analyzes these cases at the national level. “66% of them concern young women, with an average age of 20 years”. They were first identified in the South-East and in Brittany, then in the Paris region. “Complaints are widespread throughout the territory. They mainly relate to nightclubs, festivals and a handful of cases on public transport. Always crowded places, which makes investigations very difficult”specifies Camille Chaize, spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior.

#Vigilance | In the evening and in festive places, remain vigilant against the risk of wild bites. If you think you are a victim, file a complaint with the police station or the gendarmerie brigade. pic.twitter.com/XDOYMGaNWF

– Ministry of the Interior and Overseas (@Interieur_Gouv) April 28, 2022

A third of victims show no symptoms. Two-thirds have symptoms such as hot flushes, vomiting or malaise, and 15% report amnesia. “These are fairly common symptoms that don’t tell us much about the substance that may have been administered to them”, explains Emmanuel Puskarczyk, head of the Nancy University Hospital poison control center. Skepticism reigns all the more because drugging someone by injecting a product using a syringe is not easy. According to the annual survey on chemical submission carried out by the Medicines Agency, the ANSM, in general, drugs are found in the victim’s food or drink. “Sometimes there are cases of chemical submission through an IV, but the person has to let it happen, so it’s more when they are tied up or already sedated”specifies Doctor Leila Chaouachi, expert for the ANSM on the subject.

In fact, most analyzes of sting victims have revealed nothing. “The Rape Drug”, GHB, classified as a narcotic, like its derivative GBL, widely consumed in the evening, were not detected in the blood or urine of the victims. In any case not at rates which show that the victim was drugged since we all naturally secrete GHB. “GHB or GBL are not good candidates for these stealth shots. They wouldn’t work with a small amount at the end of a needle”, says Emmanuel Puskarczyk. Very strong opiates or even certain insulins could have it, but again, the analyzes of the victims revealed nothing. However, this result must be qualified, because in some cases, if the samples are not taken quickly, they become ineffective. Some drugs only remain in the blood for six to eight hours, and in the urine for 10 to 12 hours. “When the victims call after three days, they are told that it is useless to do the analyses”, says Magali Labadie, head of the poison control center at the CHU Nouvelle-Aquitaine in Bordeaux. We can also look in the hair a month after the fact. But there too, the analyzes gave nothing.

Since May 2022, in Nancy, Dijon and Bordeaux, centers have implemented protocols so that the analyzes are carried out quickly. But another element sometimes deters the victims. “You should know that it is the prosecutor who decides whether or not to carry out the analyses, because it costs more than 1,000 euros. If the prosecutor does not wish to prosecute, it is the victim who must pay”, explains Magali Labadie. Moreover, there have been so many complaints that the laboratories are struggling to keep up. Thus in September, the prosecutor of Montargis had to relaunch requests for analysis that he had made after three complaints filed in mid-July. “We are more on a three-month deadline than three weeks”confides an expert toxicologist from a laboratory working on behalf of justice. “I hope it will calm down, because it drowns out the real cases of chemical submission.”

When substances appear in analyses, doubts may still persist. In Châlons-en-Champagne, mild anxiolytics were found in the blood of a victim who said he had not consumed them. Often after investigation, the doctors realize that the plaintiff had taken medication. “There is a syrup called Apetamin, which is not sold in pharmacies, but which contains an antihistamine”, explains Laurène Dufayet, forensic pathologist at the medico-judicial unit of the Hôtel Dieu at the AP-HP. “When we find it in the analyses, and we ask people if they have taken it, they tell us yes, but they did not perceive it as a medicine”.

The fact remains that biting someone can cause health problems. After an evening in a nightclub in Rouen at the end of May, Sarah had to have regular tests for three months, worried about a possible HIV or hepatitis infection: “I had to go to the hospital for blood tests regularly, come back for the results, and be careful when having sex with my spouse”, says the young woman. In this case, no infection was discovered. “The AIDS virus is extremely fragile and would not survive on the tip of a needle, reassures doctor Leila Chaouachi. As for hepatitis, there is a recommended preventive treatment”.

In Paris where a hundred complaints have been filed, the prosecutor, Laure Beccuau wishes to keep all the investigations open because they could all the same, she thinks, lead to results later. As proof, she wants what happened when the hashtag “#BalanceTonBar” was broadcast on social networks in October 2021. The victims then explained that they had been drugged or harassed in night establishments. A year later, the server of a bar in the 5th arrondissement of Paris was finally identified. He is actively wanted for having made a young woman drink and attempted to attack her. “These cases are emblematic of what is called chemical vulnerability. Predators spot alcoholic victims to abuse them,” explains the prosecutor.

In the case of the stings, however, there are only about ten complainants who also report thefts or attempted assaults following the sting. The police only arrested a few dozen people. And in most cases, the suspects were released due to lack of evidence. Only four are still in pre-trial detention, including two men in their thirties after the complaint of a young girl in a nightclub in Six-Fours-les-Plages in the Var. “They were identified by video surveillance. Investigators found syringes and injectable products in one of them”, explains the Toulon prosecutor. The suspect who did not admit the facts, says that these products belong to his wife who is a nurse.

In Nancy, a 35-year-old homeless man was also identified as the author of injections, by three witnesses during the music festival. Syringes were found in his belongings along with cocaine. But there were none in the analyzes of the victims, and again, the man did not recognize the facts. Finally, in Toulon, during a concert for a TV show, on June 3, another man in his twenties was accused by witnesses of having tried to prick them with a syringe (which does not was not found). He admits having jostled them but denies having stung them.

It therefore appears that there is a disproportion between the number of complaints and the number of cases resolved. And we can make the same observation in the United Kingdom where the phenomenon began just a year ago, after the start of the academic year. The Home Office committee in the British Parliament wrote a report this summer that offered some possible explanations. “Some committee members noted that these complaints occurred right after the lockdown. Young victims were sometimes going out for the first time. They may have been unsure of their ability to hold drugs or alcohol, and they panicked thinking that they had been harmed”, explains Rosa Silverman, of The Telegraph newspaper. Political debates then took place to know if it was necessary to create a special offense of chemical submission by injection, or to withdraw the license of the bars in which one recorded many complaints. There are 1,800 in the UK today.

But if we take a step back, we realize that these cases are not really new. Already in 1819, more than 400 cases of sting attacks had been recorded in France, mainly in Paris. Young girls were bitten in the evening in the crowds of the Grands Boulevards in particular. A man had been arrested by the police: Auguste-Marie Bizeul, a 35-year-old tailor who denied the facts during his trial in 1820. “We will have to wait for the advent of sexology at the end of the 19th century to have clinical case studies of butt biters, explains Emmanuel Fureix, professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris Créteil. They are then considered to be sado-fetishists who take pleasure in hurting their victim, or at the sight of spilled blood..

The academic compares these “bitters” to the mat cutters who prevailed two centuries ago and who also sometimes come back in the news. In his article, The story of an urban fear: injections of women under the Restoration, the historian notes that these miscellaneous facts sometimes occur when power is in difficulty. This is the case in 1820. “The left accuses the royalists, while the right denounces a Jesuit plot. And we also accuse the police of creating a diversion with these cases, so that the press avoids talking about a very liberticidal electoral law which must be put in place”. This shows that conspiracy theories existed long before social media. And that the power sometimes instrumentalized certain news items to divert the attention of the public. In recent months, however, that is not what has happened. It is the media and social networks that have fueled the psychosis. Some hope, however, that this episode will have at least one virtue: that of alerting to what is called chemical submission, that is to say, drugging a person without their knowledge to abuse it.

*Name has been changed