Needle spiking should be treated like “terrorism,” UK MPs hear

There have been hundreds of cases in the UK.

Cases of spiking with needles in nightclubs across the UK and Ireland should be treated with the same urgency as terrorism, according to a UK parliamentary debate. MPs in UK parliament have considered a petition, created by university graduate Hannah Thomson, that calls on the government to make it a law for nightclubs to search guests on arrival. The 24 year old started the petition that now has more than 172,000 signatures after concerns were raised over needle spiking, and she realised she had not once been searched going into a club in her adult life. Speaking at the Westminster Hall debate, Gower MP Tonia Antoniazzi said: "It is becoming a craze, a trend, and it needs to be taken seriously by everyone. Will we have to wait for something terrible to happen before making a change?" MP for Warwick Matt Western added: "The escalation of scale seems to be quite extraordinary. They have to treat it with as much urgency as terrorism. It is really alarming." The debate heard that there have been 280 cases of spiking with a needle in the last two months, compared to the 2,600 recorded cases of drink spiking between 2015 and 2019 in the UK. They were also told that police in Nottinghamshire were investigating 15 cases of people who attended a party had been spiked with a sharp object in the past week. The MPs commended a trial scheme that has gone on in Devon and Cornwall where novel drink testing kits were offered to people going clubbing and could be rolled out through the UK. Calls were also made for young boys to be educated in this as a way for this behaviour to become less normalised.