Beware of laced drinks from dates

Forwarded by bayi.

Many of the spam mails that I receive contain this drug -xanax- being peddled online. I didn't know that this is one of the date rape drugs.

The SF Gate reported about a man jailed for (twice) spiking his lady friends' beer with date rape drugs:

"It looked for all the world as if the couple on a date -- he was darkly handsome and a little older than the pretty, petite blonde with the Russian accent -- were having a great time together.

"A really great time," their waitress, Karri Cormican, recalled thinking. "She was facing him, had one of her legs up on the bench seat." Good body language.

So it came as a shock when after the woman left the window-side table to visit the restroom, Cormican saw the man shake a white powder into the Hefeweizen beer he had ordered for his date.



"Did I really see that?" Cormican asked herself. "Why would he do that? It seemed like they were having fun."
...
Cormican returned to the table and told Szlamnik and his date, whom the court identified only as Tatiana K., then 34, that the woman's beer had come from a fermented keg and that they were going to replace it. Cormican brought her a Stella Artois.

Cormican carried the adulterated Hefeweizen to Bridgeman-Oxley and out of sight into a back room. They held it up to the light and saw, unmistakably, a white powder. At a preliminary hearing last summer, Nikolas Lemos, chief forensic toxicologist at the San Francisco medical examiner's office, identified the powder as zalepron, a prescription sleeping drug sold as Sonata.

After seeing the white powder, Bridgeman-Oxley said she "panicked a little bit. We had to figure out a way to keep her away from this man."

Their chance came when Tatiana went outside to smoke a cigarette. Cormican grabbed the beer with the white powder and followed her. It was a mild night in May 2005 -- the wheels of justice in this case, as one courtroom observer said, have ground exceedingly slowly.

Tatiana was stunned -- she said it was their first date, and they had met at a salsa dancing class only weeks before. Earlier, he had picked her up in his BMW after her classes at City College. "She's a trusting young lady," says David Merin, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case.

Cormican had to repeat herself several times before Tatiana absorbed what had happened. And then things got even worse.

The bartender rushed outside to tell the two women that while they had been talking, Szlamnik had dropped two pills into the new beer Tatiana had left behind on the table.

"He did it again," she said.

All three women looked through a window and saw Szlamnik trying to wipe up beer that had foamed over the edge of Tatiana's glass and was fizzing as if there were Alka-Seltzer in it.

In fact, as Dr. Lemos would later testify, the pills were alprazolam, commonly sold as Xanax, a central nervous system depressant prescribed to relieve anxiety. "In combination with alcohol," Lemos testified at the preliminary hearing, the two drugs "are encountered frequently in drug-facilitated sexual assaults ... without giving the victim the chance ... to even realize what's going on."

rape,date