Drink Spiking in Thailand
It doesn't matter where you go in the world, there are unfortunately drinks that get spiked when people are out and about and Thailand is certainly not immune from this.The main nightlife areas of Thailand are where a drink spiking is more likely to occur and tourists who travel alone are at a higher chance of getting their drink spiked than anyone else.
The place in Thailand where drink spiking is rife is the Full Moon Party and it is not uncommon for hundreds of people to have their drinks spiked at sometime during the night. There are buckets of alcohol that are served up at the party and although the majority of the buckets aren't spiked, some are spiked.
The drugs that can go into these buckets are tranquilizers and sleeping pills which make you fall asleep not long after you consume a bucket. The spikers usually watch you and follow you around until you fall asleep and once you do, they act as though they are being a good Samaritan to other punters and look as though they are attending to you, when they are actually picking your pocket.
There isn't just drugs that make you fall asleep which are put into the buckets, there is also drugs to make you stay up all night and make you drink more. Yaba is put into some of the buckets at the Party and this is what the Thai's refer to as speed or - methamphetamine. The yaba makes the party people dance more and feel like drinking more and this is why they are spiked, so the guys running the bars can make more money out of the tourists. The yaba that goes into the spiked buckets might not be much, but enough to make you feel like drinking more.
If you have any doubts about how rife drink spiking is at the Full Moon Party, then just ask one of the foreign volunteers which work at the party and they will tell it to you like it is. Remember, the Full Moon Party is held on an island which is almost lawless and the only laws that seem to get enforced here are against the tourists for money making opportunities.
It should be noted that the police don't have to find drugs on you for you to go to jail, they only have to suspect that you have had drugs and ask you to have a urine test and if that test shows up positive, you could potentially go to jail, or pay a large amount of money to stay out of it.
If you are at the Full Moon Party by yourself, you have to be very careful and it would be wise to not drink out of any buckets or shakes and if you are getting a drink out of a bottle, watch it being opened. It would also be a good idea to not tell anyone that you are alone at the party.
There are said to be around 100 people who have their pockets picked and 1 person that dies on the average at each Full Moon Party, which is held atleast once a month, so you have to be careful there, especially if you are on your own.
There is a much smaller chance of getting your drink spiked at the other nightlife hot spots in Thailand, but it can happen at places such as Phuket, Pattaya, Bangkok, or any well known nightlife area. There has been a big story in the Phuket Gazette about about a team of bar girls who spiked tourists drinks with a concoction of sleeping pills which were crushed up into a powder and then put into liquid in a container. They would find a male tourist and ask if they can go back to his room for drinks and once they got the chance, they tip some of the solution into his drink while he wasn't watching and then wait for him to go to sleep. Once their victim was asleep, they would rob everything valuable that they could get their hands on. It wasn't until several complaints were made, that the police appeared to take action. The action that was taken by the police was an absolute joke and some fines were handed out and it was only a very short time later that one of the same women which was involved in the first incident - was caught walking around Bangla Road with more sleeping pills in her pocket.
The scary thing about all of this is, these women got a slap on the wrist by the authorities and were back out again doing the same thing that they were doing before. The rest of them are no doubt out there somewhere in Patong or somewhere else in Thailand looking to drug their next victim, so you really need to be careful with your drink and watch it at all times.
There may be other cases just like the ones mentioned above but the tourists may not go to the police due to embarrassment, or they report the incident and no action is taken.
There are mysterious deaths which happen quite frequently in Thailand and most of these deaths don't make the headlines in other countries. There has been many deaths which are declared as suicides by the police and are not investigated properly. One would hate to think about the real statistics of how many of these are from drink spiking overdoses. You don't hear about exactly how many people die in Thailand from the authorities here, as they know it will have a negative impact on tourism, so the best advice would be to be careful at all times while you are on holidays in Thailand.