Tag Archives: benzodiazepines

I am one and you are too? Narcissism, violence, lessons not learned, and the case of the Hot Chocolate rapist

 

On October 9, 2016, the Daily Mail (UK) reported the death of Harry Barkas, Australia’s so-called “hot chocolate rapist” who was convicted of drugging and assaulting women to whom he offered rides home from nightclubs. At the time, this offender’s exploits were covered as a serial rape case, rather than attempting to shoehorn it into the public drink spiking scare narrative. In Drink Spiking and Predatory Drugging: A Modern History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), I wrote about the failure of the press and other public health and safety communicators to learn about the nature of this crime from key American and Australian serial cases like Barkas’. Below, I provide an adapted excerpt from my book that refocuses on misplaced trust, context, and links to a chapter that discusses the dynamics of this crime.

From Chapter 6, Who and Where are the Druggers? 

(Other chapters are available as book previews at Amazon.com and Google Books)

 

[…] Chef John Xydias of Melbourne was accused of drugging, raping, and videotaping 13 women he had met through work. In some cases, he was introduced to his victims by a man named Harry Barkas, who was, at roughly the same time Xydias got caught, accused of being the “Hot Chocolate” rapist. Barkas, who worked in a medical clinic and had access to drugs, approached women as they left nightclubs and offered them a ride home. According to a 2008 Herald Sun article, he then offered them hot chocolate into which he had slipped tranquilizers and sleeping pills, including Rohypnol. Barkas was charged with a string of attacks between 1991 and 2005, and Xydias between 1995 and 2006. Both were in their mid-40s.

Xydias typically met women through the restaurant business, and Barkas sometimes did, too.  The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, reported that one of Barkas’ victims worked at the same restaurant he did and regarded him as “an older brother or uncle.”   Xydias drugged and filmed many women while dressing them up and assaulting them. Upon sentencing in 2010, when he was convicted of 86 charges relating to 11 victims, he told the court that the women only lodged charges against him as vengeance for not continuing a relationship with them. Like other such serial offenders, he claimed that the acts were consensual and that the women were heavy drinkers and drug users.

While it may be the case that the reason nearly all of the men [accused of multiple attacks] say the acts were consensual is strictly a legal strategy—when the prosecution has a recording of your raping behavior, there are not that many defenses left—it is possible that pathological fantasy, on some level, has made this claim seem real to the offenders. They often see themselves as decadent nightlife hedonists who push the boundaries—so they think, well, why wouldn’t or shouldn’t their victims be? As in, I am one and you are, too. As edgeplay, they might even consider it relatively tame— “just” drugs. Xydias’ pre-sentence psychiatric report called him emotionally disconnected, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald.  Barkas’ report suggested a narcissistic personality disorder; his ability to be accountable for his actions was limited; he was suspected of many more assaults than he could be charged with due to lack of evidence.

There was some question of Xydias’ relationship to Barkas. Though they were childhood friends and frequented the same venues, they did not, apparently, offend against the same women. Barkas appears to have been more sporadic with his assaults, with a suspected cluster taking place in the mid-1990s and another right before his arrest, leaving a gap of more than a decade, according to the Herald Sun. Although police suspected there must have been more victims in between, that is not entirely clear. Barkas was sentenced to 13 years and Xydias, 28.

The legendary public-place drink spiking, followed by a carry-off and assault, as we have seen, has too many moving parts to really be very common. What we find in its place, much more commonly, is voluntary intoxication followed by misplaced trust, or coevolving with it, and then victimization in a private setting. As with acquaintance rape generally, it is really the moment of misplaced trust that is exploited by the assailant. Intoxication helps, of course, in reducing the ability to resist unwanted sex, and as such, is simply another tool to facilitate an act of violence. Drugging can make detail retention hazy enough that the victim questions what really happened, and may be more reluctant to report it, though this amnesia is not guaranteed, any more than it is with large amounts of alcohol or voluntary drug ingestion. Culture then piles on by blaming women who drink for anything that happens after. On both individual and collective level, the gaslighting begins. Some gaslighters are better at this sort of thing than others. [I continue in the book by talking about the US case of Jeffery Marsalis]

[back to the main page]

What’s in Your Drugs? And Does it Matter if it isn’t what you think? (Part 1 of 2)

Summer Drug Testing Roundup, part 1 of 2: 

In mid-July in Yorkshire, England, ITV and other news sources reported that purchasers of “street Valium” got more than they bargained for and a number of them had sought medical attention. The first odd thing was that the drug had turned their tongues blue, and the second was that the drugs’ effects were much heavier than expected. Within weeks, police made an arrest and recovered about 40 more of the suspect tablets.

It appears that the underground compounder making the drugs mixed diazepam (known by one of its commercial names, Valium) with flunitrazepam (known as Rohypnol) or “roofies.” Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche began blue-dye tagging Rohypnol tabs in response to spiked-drink reports in the United States in the late 1990s. Both Valium and Rohypnol are benzodiazepines, but Rohypnol is stronger. Roche makes both of the name brands, but generic versions are around, as well. Valium is mostly used as an anti-anxiety drug, whereas Rohypnol treats insomnia. (Roche was never all that aggressive in seeking to swim upstream against the negative publicity as it marketed the drug in the US. Rohypnol was too similar to other insomnia drugs anyway, and Roche focused mainly on countering the negative publicity.)

No doubt the purchasers of the illicit drug had expected a Valium-high, but experienced something more anvil-like and presumably suffered some of Rohypnol’s known side effects, such as amnesia.

The recent incident in Yorkshire points up the strangeness of continuing to use the term “date rape drugs” in any meaningful way. References to Rohypnol assume, often without sources or reference, that it is widely implicated in drugging and drink-spiking cases. In fact, Rohypnol is available by prescription in Europe and elsewhere, and it is rarely implicated in predatory drugging incidents. In the handful of cases where anything other than high blood-alcohol levels has been found, none of the commonly labeled “date rape drugs” are among the top substances. Instead, the usual street substances are found, including stimulants. But the moniker “roofie” leapt clear of its origins and took on a meaning of its own.

The Yorkshire Street Valium incident points to a more common problem — adulterated drugs in the illicit market. Up until recently, consumers of illegal or restricted substances had no way to verify that what they were buying was what they thought they were buying. Underground mid-level distributors and wholesalers sometimes employed chemists for verification of samples from larger lots they were negotiating to buy, but the street user was more or less on his or her own. In the US, there have been a number of cases in which seekers of heroin were sold heroin-fentanyl combinations, with sometimes fatal results. Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opiate, and by weight or volume tends to be considerably stronger than heroin. Also this July, law enforcement in Long Island, NY arrested 24 people in connection with heroin and fentanyl distribution. At least one of the combinations they were distributing seems to have provoked an uptick in overdoses.

But in describing a street preparation as a deadly dose, you have to consider not only the objective effects of a particular dose, but the expectations that the buyer and user bring to the anticipated high. Fentanyl itself is now sought out, on its own or in combinations, by illicit users. Heroin users often expect their purchases to be cut with other things; toxicologists note that most of the time, the adulterants buffer rather than strengthen the effects of the drug. But the haphazard and after-the-fact investigation of the content of illicit substances, as well as a non-transparent supply chain, means that it is difficult to separate effects of the drugs themselves and the drugs’ potential substitutions and additives.

In my book on drugs associated with the “date rape drugs” scare, I noted that there was really no factual basis to label certain popular club drugs like GHB as the preferred weapons of predators. GHB, Ketamine, and Rohypnol – like many central nervous system depressants – have been implicated in specific cases, but any CNS depressant can work, and the labeled drugs are found less often than other widely available drugs (and, of course, alcohol). GHB also presents an interesting conundrum in that it is often not clear whether people who had some in their system were dosed by someone else with ill intent, or whether the GHB was a part of a popular mix of MDMA and GHB sometimes sought out in club settings.

Just to add to the confusion, GHB’s street names are myriad, including Liquid Ecstasy and Cherry Meth. and its effects are seemingly subjective enough to be mistaken for any number of knowingly ingested substances.  The underground compounder often finds that GHB is a cheap substitute for other drugs. GHB is also sought out by recreational users for its reputation as a calorie-free buzz mimicking moderate alcohol ingestion. It can be very dangerous, however, in combination with alcohol.

Voluntary drug users clearly might benefit by being able to quickly and easily test the content and potency of their drugs, but for many reasons the market hasn’t reached this potential public yet.  In my next blog, I discuss the problems with validity and reliability of home and field drug test kits, and the products that come to market to purportedly fix this problem. Depending on context, testing technology can either aid well-being and safety or undermine it.