New Nail Polish Alerts Wearers To Date Rape Drugs

Posted by samzenpus on Monday August 25, 2014 @02:24AM from the at-the-tips-of-your-fingers dept.

stephendavion writes Checking to see if your drink has been tampered with is about to get a whole lot more discreet. Thanks to the work of four North Carolina State University undergrads, you'll soon be able to find out without reaching for a testing tool. That's because you'll already have five of them on each hand. The team — Ankesh Madan, Stephen Gray, Tasso Von Windheim, and Tyler Confrey-Maloney — has come up with a creative and unobtrusive way to package chemicals that react when exposed to Rohypnol and GHB. They put it in nail polish that they're calling Undercover Colors.

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Re: The world we live in. by Cruciform · 2014-08-25 08:36 · Score: 1, Redundant

There's no doubt that they are used but the prevalence is likely as exaggerated as "stranger danger".
In the UK 75 cases of suspected dosing were investigated and only one person turned out to have a date-rape drug in their tox screen. The other cases appeared to be people drinking to excess.
This doesn't put the blame on the victim instead of a rapist. We should also be aware that the regular old issue of people getting shitfaced is still a real contributor to creating vulnerable targets for predators.